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INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 



INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 



HISTORICAL OUTLINES 



BY 

H. DE B. GIBBINS, M.A. 

SOMETIME UNIVERSITY (COBDEN) PRIZEMAN IN POLITICAL ECONOMY, OXFORD 

AUTHOR OF "THE INDUSTRIAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND" AND 

"THE HISTORY OF COMMERCE IN EUROPE - ' 



WITH MAPS, TABLES, AND A PLAN 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1897 



TO MY WIFE 



OF INDUSTKIAL HISTOKY AND 
SOCIAL EEFOEM. 

". . . The Sibyl offers her books, in which the future 
is forecast, to the Roman statesman, according to the 
legend. The price is refused twice, and, after each repulse, 
she destroys irrevocably one of the volumes, demanding 
the same price for the third. TJiis is ivhat Bacon called 
the wisdom of the ancients, and the moral is plain." 

JAMES E. THOEOLD KOGEKS. 



PREFACE 

In 1890 the author published a small book, entitled The 
Industrial History of England, which met with a some- 
what undeserved success, and has rapidly gone through 
several large editions. It was described in the first preface 
as " an attempt to relate in a short, concise, and simple form 
the main outlines of England's economic and industrial 
history," meant " to serve as an introduction to a fuller 
study of the subject, and as a preliminary sketch which 
the reader can afterwards, if he wishes, fill in for himself 
from larger volumes ; " and it seems to have attained its 
object of awakening popular interest, to some extent, in a 
very important branch of national history. But it had all 
the faults of a brief outline, and contained errors of fact 
and of expression which no one has regretted more sincerely 
than the author. It has therefore been my endeavour, in 
this larger work, to produce a History of Industry of a more 
satisfactory character, while at the same time retaining the 
essential features that characterised the earlier effort. As 
before, I have attempted, as far as possible, in the brief 
limits of a work like this, to connect economic and industrial 
questions with social, political, and military movements, 
since only in some such mutual relation can historical 
events obtain their full significance. 

The Industrial History of England has been taken, on 
the whole, as the basis of this book, and the arrangement 



viii PREFACE 

of periods and chapters has been but slightly altered ; but 
the original book has been entirely re- written, and so much 
new matter has been added that the present volume is 
quite three times the size of the first essay. Fresh maps 
have been drawn, new tables of statistics added, and foot- 
notes have been given for every statement of any im- 
portance. 

The first period also, up to the Norman conquest, 

contains entirely new matter, involving a certain amount 

of original work. For some time it has appeared to me 

that the results of archaeological and antiquarian research 

into the pre-historic period have not been sufficiently 

utilised in dealing with our industrial history, and that the 

origin of the manor, in especial, derives added light from 

these investigations. It has therefore been my endeavour 

to weave into the story of industrial progress several of the 

results arrived at by investigators of pre-historic conditions, 

believing, as I do, that the many centuries of industrial 

human life which elapsed before our written history began 

must have left upon our nation some traces of their 

course. At the same time, I have not wished to emphasise 

the pre-historic period unduly, and have therefore confined 

the remarks upon it to a very limited space. But I hope 

that the " survey of the origin of the manor," in § 32, may 

be some contribution to the discussion of the subject. 

Throughout the book I have tried to review the in- 
dustrial life of England as a whole, and to present a general 
survey of it throughout its gradual development. In this 
respect Industry in England differs from most works of 
the kind, for they have generally been devoted either to 
some special period or some special aspect, or have dealt 



PREFACE 



IX 



with industry only as a branch of the national commerce. I 
have endeavoured to give full weight to the views of other 
writers, especially on disputed points, 1 but have also indi- 
cated my own (though with considerable diffidence) where 
there seemed reason to differ from them. I do not suppose 
that I have succeeded in being impartial, for, though 
impartiality is the ideal, it is also the will o' the wisp of 
the historian, and generally deserts him when he needs it 
most ; but I have at least endeavoured to give reasons for 
my conclusions. And while in some points I differ, no 
one admires more than myself the work of sucb historians 
as Dr Cunningham and Professor Ashley, whose names I 
venture specially to mention, because I wish gratefully to 
acknowledge the magnitude of the help rendered to me, as 
to all students, by their recent contributions to industrial 
history. My obligations to them are, I trust, acknowledged 
as often as possible in the footnotes, but mere references of 
that kind cannot convey by any means adequately the 
extent to which a student like myself has benefited from 
their researches. 

As regards the footnotes generally, every endeavour has 
been made to acknowledge all the sources which have been 
consulted, and any omission in this respect the author 
sincerely regrets. Considerable difficulty was occasioned 
by my change of residence during the completion of the 
book, and a consequent compulsory recourse to different 
libraries ; and the indulgence of readers and critics is 
therefore asked for any omission or error thereby caused. 
It might also be added that this book has been written in 

1 As, e.g., The Peasants' Revolt, the condition of the Labourer in the 
fifteenth century, the Poor Law of Elizabeth, the Assessment of Wages, 
&c, &c. 



x PREFACE 

the intervals of a very busy life, and out of reach of any 
special collection of works on industrial subjects or of any 
of the greater libraries of the kingdom. 

I cannot conclude without paying a tribute to the 
memory of the late Professor J. E. Thorold Rogers, to 
whom I showed, as a mere beginner in his special subject, 
the proofs of the first few chapters of the little book {The 
Industrial History of England) from which this larger 
volume has developed. To his kindly encouragement and to 
the inspiring teaching of his economic works, I owe what- 
ever knowledge I possess of that side of our national 
history which is of such vast importance to a citizen of 
modern England. 

H. de B. GIBBINS. 

Liverpool, September 1896. 



CONTENTS 



PERIOD I 

EARLY HISTOKY, FROM PRE-HISTORIC TIMES TO THE 
NORMAN CONQUEST 



CHAPTER I 



PBE-BOMAN BRITAIN 



SECTION 

1. Industrial History .... 

2. The English Nation and Country . 

3. The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Britain 

4. Their Social and Economic Condition 

5. The Bronze Age and the Celtic Immigration 

6. Resume : The Peoples of Early Britain 

7. Their Social and Economic Condition 

8. The Celts in the time of Pytheas . 

9. Foreign Trade of Britain . 

10. Internal Trade : Roads and Rivers 

11. Physical Aspect of Pre-Roman Britain 



PAGE 
3 
3 

5 
7 
8 
10 
10 
11 
14 
16 
17 



CHAPTER II 

ROMAN BRITAIN 

12. The Roman Occupation 

13. Roman Roads .... 

14. Roman Towns in Britain . 

15. The Romans and Agriculture 

16. Celtic and Non-Roman Influence in Agriculture 

17. Commerce and Industry in Roman Britain 



21 
22 
23 
25 
27 
31 



CHAPTER III 

THE SAXON PERIOD 

18. The Saxon Invasions 

19. The Saxon Village and its Inhabitants 

20. Village Life .... 

21. Methods of Cultivation 



34 
37 

38 
40 



Xll 



CONTENTS 



SECTION 

22. Isolation of Villages. Crafts and Trades. Markets 

23. Foreign Commerce and the Danes 

24. Summary of Trade and Industry in the Saxon Period 



PAGE 

41 
43 
46 



CHAPTER IV 

THE MANOR AND THE MANORIAL SYSTEM 

25. The Interest of the Question as to the Origin of the Manor 

26. The Mark Theory and the Manor . 

27. Criticisms of the Mark Theory 

28. Vinogradoff s Evidence on the Manorial System 

29. Evidence from Manorial Courts and Customs 

30. The " Customary " Tenants 

31. The Evidence of Village Communities 

32. A Survey of the Origin of the Manor 

33. The Feudal System 



47 
48 
49 
52 
55 
56 
57 
58 
60 



PERIOD II 

FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST TO THE REIGN OF 
HENRY III 

(1066-1216 a.d.) 
CHAPTER V 



DOMESDAY BOOK AND THE MANORS 

84. The Survey ordered by William I. 

35. The Population given by Domesday 

36. The Wealth of various Districts . 

37. The Manors and Lords of the Manors 

38. The Inhabitants of the Manor 

39. The Condition of these Inhabitants 

40. Services due to the Lord from his Tenants in Villeinage 

41. Money Payments and Rents 

42. Free Tenants. Soke-men .... 

43. The Distinction between Free and Unfree Tenants 

44. Illustrations of Manors from Domesday . 

45. Cuxham Manor in the Eleventh and Thirteenth Centuries 

46. Description of a Manor Village 

47. The Decay of the Manorial System 



65 
66 
68 
70 
71 
73 
74 
74 
75 
76 
78 
79 
80 
84 



CHAPTER VI 

THE TOWNS AND THE GILDS 



48. The Origin of the Towns 

49. Rise of Towns in England 

50. Towns in Domesday 



S6 
87 



CONTENTS 



Xlll 



SECTION 

51. Special Privileges of Towns 

52. How the Towns obtained their Charters . 

53. The Gilds and the Towns. Various kinds of Gilds 

54. How the Merchant Gilds helped the Growth of Towns 

55. How the Craft Gilds helped Industry 

56. Life in the Towns of this time 



PAGE 

89 
90 
91 
93 
94 
96 



CHAPTER VII 

MANUFACTURES AND TRADE : ELEVENTH TO THIRTEENTH CENTURIES 

57. Economic Effects of the Feudal System .... 98 

58. Foreign Trade. The Crusades . . . . .100 

59. The Trading Clauses in the Great Charter . . . 101 

60. The Jews in England . . . . . .103 

61. Manufactures in this Period : Flemish Weavers . . . 104 

62. Economic Appearance of England in this Period. Population. 

The North and South ...... 106 

63. General Condition of the Period ..... 108 



PERIOD III 

FROM THE THIRTEENTH TO THE END OF THE 
FIFTEENTH CENTURY, INCLUDING THE GREAT PLAGUE 

(1216-1500) 



CHAPTER VIII 

AGRICULTURE IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND 

64. Introductory. Rise of a Wage-earning Class 

65. Agriculture the Chief Occupation of the People . 

66. Methods of Cultivation. The Capitalist Landlord and his Bailiff, 

The ' ' Stock and Land " Lease . 

67. The Tenants' Communal Land and Closes 

68. Ploughing .... 

69. Stock, Pigs, and Poultry . 

70. Sheep .... 

71. Increase of Sheep-farming . 

72. Consequent Increase of Enclosures 



111 
112 

113 
115 
116 
116 

117 
118 
119 



CHAPTER IX 

THE WOOLLEN TRADE AND MANUFACTURES 



73. England's Monopoly of Wool 

74. Wool and Politics . 

75. Prices and Brands of English Wool 

76. English Manufactures 



120 
121 
124 
125 



XIV 



CONTENTS 



SECTION 

77. Foreign Manufacture of Fine Goods 

78. Flemish Settlers teach the English Weavers. 

79. The Worsted Industry . 

80. Gilds in the Cloth Trade . 

81. The Dyeing of Cloth 

82. The Great Transition in English Industry 

83. The Manufacturing Class and Politics 



Norwich 



PAGE 

126 
127 
129 
130 
131 
131 
132 



CHAPTER X 

THE TOWNS, INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES, AND FAIRS 

84. The Chief Manufacturing Towns . 

85. Staple Towns and the Merchants 

86. Markets ..... 

87. The Great Fairs .... 

88. The Fairs of Winchester and Stourbridge 

89. English Mediaeval Ports . 

90. The Temporary Decay of Manufacturing Towns 

91. Growth of Industrial Villages. The Germs of the Modern Fac 

tory System ' . 



134 
135 
138 
140 
142 
144 
145 

146 



CHAPTER XI 

THE GREAT PLAGUE AND ITS ECONOMIC EFFECTS 

92. Material Progress of the Country. 

93. Social Changes. The Villeins and the Wage-paid Labourers 

94. The Famine and the Plague 

95. The Effects of the Plague on Wages 

96. Prices of Provisions .... 

97. Effects of the Plague upon the Landowners 

98. Large and Small Holdings : the Yeomen 

99. The Statute of Quia Emptores 
100. The Emancipation of the Villeins 



149 
150 
151 
152 
155 
156 
157 
158 
159 



CHAPTER XII 

THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381, AND THE SUBSEQUENT CONDITION OF THE 
WORKING CLASSES 



s 



101. The Place of the Revolt in English History 

102. New Social Doctrines 

103. The Coming of the Friars. Wiklif 

104. The Renewed Exactions of the Landowners 

105. Social and Political Questions 

106. The Mutterings of a Storm 

107. The Storm Breaks Out . 

108. The Result of the Revolt 

109. The Condition of the English Labourer . 

110. Purchasing Power of Wages 

111. Drawbacks .... 



161 
162 
163 
164 
165 
167 
168 
170 
172 
175 
177 



CONTENTS 



XV 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES 
SECTION 

112. The Nobility .... 

113. The Country Gentry 

114. The Yeomen .... 

115. Agriculture and Sheep-farming . 

116. The Stock and Land Lease 

117. The Towns and Town Constitutions 

118. The Gilds and Municipal Institutions 

119. The Decay of Certain Towns 

120. The Commercial and Industrial Changes of the Fifteenth 

Century .... 

121. The Close of the Middle Ages . 



PAGE 

180 
182 
183 
184 
186 
187 
139 
190 

192 
194 



PERIOD IV 

FROM THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY TO THE EVE OF THE 
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 

(1509-1716) 
CHAPTER XIV 



THE REIGN OF HENRY YIII., AND ECONOMIC CHANGES IN THE 
SIXTEENTH CENTURY 

122. Henry VIII. 's Wastefulness 

123. The Dissolution of the Monasteries 

124. Results of the Suppression 

125. Pauperism 

126. The Issuing of Base Coin . 

127. The Confiscation of the Gild Lands 

128. Bankruptcy and Rapacity of Edward VI. 's Government 

129. The Agrarian Situation . 

130. The Enclosures of the Sixteenth Century 

131. Evidence of the Results of Enclosing 

132. Other Economic Changes. The Finances 

133. Summary of the Changes of the Sixteenth Century 



199 
202 
203 
205 
206 
207 
209 
211 
213 
215 
218 
220 



CHAPTER XV 

THE GROWTH OF FOREIGN TRADE 

134. The Expansion of Commerce. The New Spirit . 

135. Foreign Trade in the Fifteenth Century . 

136. The Venetian Fleet .... 

137. The Hanseatic League's Station in London 



223 
224 
225 
227 






XVI 



CONTENTS 



BECTIOK PAGE 

138. Trade with Flanders. Antwerp in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth 

Centuries ....... 228 

139. The Decay of Antwerp and Rise of London as the Western 

Emporium ....... 230 

140. The Merchants and Sea-Captains of the Elizabethan Age in the 

New World . . . . . .231 

141. Remarks on the Signs and Causes of the Expansion of Trade . 232 

CHAPTER XVI 



J. 



142. 
143. 
144. 
145. 
146. 
147. 
148. 
149. 
150. 
151. 
152. 
153. 
154. 
155. 
156. 
157. 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 

Prosperity and Pauperism 

The Restoration of the Currency . 

The Growth of Manufactures 

Monopolies of Manufacturing Towns 

Exports of Manufactures and Foreign Trade 

The Flemish Immigration 

Monopolies ..... 

The Revival of the Craft Gilds . 

Agriculture ..... 

Social Comforts ..... 

The Condition of the Labourers . 

Assessment of Wages by Justices. The First Poor Law 

The Working of the Assessment System 

The Law of Apprenticeship 

The Elizabethan Poor Law 

Population ..... 



234 
235 
236 
239 
240 
241 
242 
246 
247 
250 
251 
253 
255 
259 
260 
263 



CHAPTER XVII 



PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH 
CENTURIES 

158. Resume of Progress since Thirteenth Century . . . 265 

159. Progress in James I. 's Reign. Influence of Landlords . . 266 

160. Writers on Agriculture. Improvements. Game . . 267 

161. Drainage of the Fens ...... 268 

162. Rise of Price of Corn and of Rent . . . .269 

163. Special Features of the Eighteenth Century. Popularity of 

Agriculture ....... 270 

164. Improvements of Cattle, and in the Productiveness of Land. 

Statistics . . . . . . .271 

165. Survivals of Primitive Culture. Common Fields . . 273 

166. Great Increase of Enclosures ..... 274 

167. Benefits of Enclosures as Compared with the Old Common Fields 275 

168. The Decay of the Yeomanry ..... 276 

169. Causes of the Decay of the Yeomanry .... 278 

170. The Rise in Rent . ...... 279 

171. The Fall in Wages 280 



CONTENTS 



xvn 



CHAPTER XVIII 



COMMERCE AND WAR IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH 

CENTURIES 

SECTION PAGE 

172. England a Commercial Power ..... 284 

173. The Beginnings of the Straggle with Spain . . . 285 

174. Cromwell's Commercial Wars and the Navigation Acts . . 286 

175. The Wars of William III. and of Anne . . . .288 

176. English Colonies ....... 290 

177. Further Wars with France and Spain . . . 291 

178. The Struggle for India ...... 293 

179. The Conquest of Canada ...... 295 

180. Survey of Commercial Progress during these Wars . . 296 

181. Commercial Events of the Seventeenth Century (Banking — the 

Bank of England,' National Debt, Restoration of the Currency) 299 

182. Other Important Commercial Events (Darien Scheme, Union of 

England and Scotland, Methuen Treaty, Speculation and the 

South Sea Bubble) ...... 301 



CHAPTER XIX 



MANUFACTURES AND MINING 

183. Circumstances Favourable to English Manufactures 

184. Wool Trade. Home Manufactures. Dyeing 

185. Other Influences Favourable to England. The Huguenot Im 

migration ...... 

186. Distribution of the Cloth Trade .... 

187. Coal Mines ...... 

188. Development of Coal Trade : Seventeenth and Eighteenth 

Centuries ...... 

189. The Iron Trade ...... 

190. Pottery ....... 

191. Other Mining Industries ..... 

192. The Close of the Period of Manual Industries 



305 
305 

307 
308 
310 

311 
312 
314 
315 
316 



PERIOD V 

THE INDUSTKIAL KEVOLUTION AND MODEEN 
ENGLAND 



CHAPTER XX 

THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION 

193. Industry and Politics. Landowners and Merchant Princes . 321 

194. The Coming of the Capitalists . . . . .324 

1 95. The Class of Small Manufacturers . . . .326 

196. The Condition of the Manufacturing Population . . 327 



XV111 



CONTENTS 



SECTION 

197. Two Examples of Village Life 

198. Condition of the Agricultural Population 

199. Growth of Population 

200. England still mainly Agricultural 

201. The Domestic System of Manufacture . 



PAGE 

328 
331 
332 

334 



CHAPTER XXI 

THE EPOCH OF THE GREAT INVENTIONS 

202. The Suddenness of the Revolution and its Importance . . 341 

203. The Great Inventors ...... 343 

204. The Revolution in Manufactures and the Factories . . 347 

205. The Growth of Population and the Development of the Northern 

Districts ....... 349 

206. The Revolution in the Mining Industries . . . 352 

207. The Improvements in Communications .... 354 

208. The Nation's Wealth and its Wars . . . .356 



CHAPTER XXII 

WARS, POLITICS, AND INDUSTRY 

209. England's Industrial Advantages in 1763 

210. The Mercantile Theory .... 

211. The Mercantile Theory in Practice 

212. English Policy towards the Colonies 

213. Attempts to raise a Revenue from America 

214. Outbreak of War ..... 

215. The Great Continental War 

216. Its Effects upon Industry and the Working Classes 

217. Politics among the Working Classes 

218. Political Results of the Industrial Revolution . 



358 
359 
361 
364 
367 
368 
370 
372 
376 
378 



CHAPTER XXIII 



THE FACTORY SYSTEM AND ITS RESULTS 



219. The Results of the Introduction of the Factory System 

220. Machinery and Hand Labour 

221. Loss of Rural Life and of Bye- Industries 

222. Contemporary Evidence of the New Order of Things 

223. English Slavery. The Apprentice System 

224. The Beginning of the Factory Agitation . 

225. Efforts towards Factory Reform 

226. Richard Oastler . 

227. Factory Agitation in Yorkshire. For and Against 

228. Ten Hours' Day and Mr Sadler 

229. The Evidence of Facts . 

230. English Slavery . 

231. The Various Factory Acts 

232. How these Acts were Passed 



381 
383 
385 
387 
388 
391 
392 
393 
395 
397 
398 
400 
403 
404 



CONTENTS 



xix 



CHAPTER XXIV 

THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASSES 
SECTION 

233. Disastrous Effects of the New Industrial System 

234. The Allowance System of Relief . 

235. The Growth of Pauperism and the Old Poor Law 

236. The Poor Law and the Allowance System 

237. Restrictions upon Labour 

238. The Combination Acts 

239. Growth of Trades Unions 

240. The Working Classes Fifty Years Ago 

241. Wages .... 



PAGE 

407 
408 
410 

412 
415 
416 
419 
421 
424 



CHAPTER XXV 



THE RISE AND DEPRESSION OF MODERN AGRICULTURE 

242. Services Rendered by the Great Landowners 

243. The Agricultural Revolution 

244. The Stimulus caused by the Bounties 

245. Agriculture under Protection 

246. Improvements in Agriculture 

247. The Depression in Modern Agriculture 

248. The Causes of the Depression (lack of capital, rents, lack 

adaptability, lack of education and scientific methods) 

249. The Labourer and the Land .... 

250. The Condition of the Labourer .... 

251. The Present Condition of British Agriculture 



427 
430 
433 
435 
436 
439 

441 
445 
447 
450 



CHAPTER XXVI 

MODERN INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND 

252. The Growth of our Industry 

253. State of Trade in 1820 .... 

254. The Beginnings of Free Trade 

255. Revolution in the Means of Transit 

256. Modern Developments .... 

257. Our Colonies . . . . • . 

258. England and other Nations' Wars 

259. Present Difficulties. Commercial Crises . 

260. Commercial Crises since 1865 

261. The Recent Depression in Trade . 

262. The Present Mercantile System. Foreign Markets 

263. Over-production and Wages 

264. The Power of Labour. Trades Unions and Co-operation. Labour 

Politics ....... 

265. The Necessity of Studying Economic Factors in History 



454 
455 
456 
458 
459 
461 
463 
464 
466 
467 
469 
470 

471 
473 



LIST OF MAPS 

1. Physical Aspect of England in Saxon and Norman 

Times ..... To face page 65 

2. Plan of a Typical Village . . . On 'page 84 

3. The Distribution of Wealth in England in 1503 To face page 196 

4. The Distribution of Wealth in England in 1636 „ 263 

5. Industrial England, 1700-1750 (Showing Popu- 

lation and Manufactures) . . „ 350 

6. Industrial England in 1895 (Showing Population 

and Manufactures) . . . „ 454 



PERIOD I 

EARLY HISTORY, FROM PRE-HISTORIC TIMES 
TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST 



THE 

HISTORY OF INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 



CHAPTER I 

PEE-ROMAN BRITAIN 

§ 1. Industrial History. 
The history of a nation's industry must necessarily date 
back to pre-historic times and to the earliest stages of national 
life. Tor the history of industry is the history of civilisation, 
and a nation's economic development must, to a large extent, 
underlie and influence the course of its social and political 
progress. Hence it has been aptly remarked x that there is 
no fact in a nation's history but has some traceable bearing 
on the industry of the time, and no fact that can be 
altogether ignored as if it were unconnected with industrial 
life. " The progress of mankind is written in the history 
of its tools ; " 2 and to the economic historian the transition 
from the axehead of stone to that of bronze is quite as 
important as a change of dynasty ; and certainly, in its way, 
it is as serious an industrial revolution as the change from 
the hand-loom to machinery. There are, indeed, few studies 
more interesting than that in which we watch, how a nation 
developes in economic progress, passing from one stage of 
industrial activity to another, till at length it reaches the 
varied and multitudinous complexity of toil that forms our 
present system of industry and commerce. During this 
progress the necessities of its trade and manufactures bring 
it into contact with the politics of other nations in a manifold 
and often a curious variety of ways, and thus political history 
gains fresh interest and a clearer light from causes which, in 
themselves, are often neglected as obscure or insignificant. 

§ 2. The English Nation and Country. 

Now, in dealing with the history of England, or indeed 

1 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, I. p. 7. 

2 Walpole, Land of Home Rule, p. 15. 3 



4 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

with that of any other nation, there are two fixed data which 
must always be considered first, namely, the people and their 
country. So much has been said about the special fitness 
of the people and country of England for the pursuits of 
industry and commerce that we are apt to forget that this 
fitness has only been discovered in very recent times, and 
that, till the days of Elizabeth, the English were far behind 
several other European nations, if not in economic develop- 
ment, at any rate in economic supremacy. It is, in fact, 
useful to remind ourselves that England is not inhabited by a 
naturally inventive nation, 1 and that we owe most of our pro- 
gress in the arts and manufactures to foreign influences. The 
causes, moreover, of English supremacy and commerce in the 
nineteenth century are almost as recent as that supremacy it- 
self, and, with one great exception — the application of steam- 
power to industry — reside more in the natural advantages 
of the country than in the natural ingenuity of the nation. 

But since the dawn of history both people and country 
have undergone many and remarkable changes, and, indeed, 
few things are more essential to an adequate understanding 
of the English people and their economic progress than a 
recognition of the fact that they consist of an exceedingly 
mixed population. Like a palimpsest which has been used 
over and over again, the general surface of English char- 
acteristics presents to the historical inquirer, in a more or 
less blurred condition, the traces of Teutonic, Roman, Celtic, 
and even pre-historic races, who have each contributed their 
quota to the economic progress of the nation and to the 
physical peculiarities of the individual. To take but one 
instance, the agricultural development of this country was 
for centuries profoundly affected by the manorial system, 
and in the village community upon which this was based 
we can see survivals of each of the waves of conquest which 
passed over the land, while beneath and below them all 
remain, as crystallised relics of a pre-historic age, strange 
customs and habits of a primitive race that lead us back in 
thought to the earliest dawn of civilised institutions. 

It will not, therefore, be altogether out of place if we 
attempt to obtain some slight idea of those early races who 

1 Rogers, Econ. Interp. of History, ch. xiii. 



PRE-ROMAN BRITAIN 5 

inhabited England long before it had gained its present 
name, or had even received its Romanised-Celtic appellation 
of Britannia. For whole races of mankind are rarely, if 
ever, entirely annihilated ; " the blood of the conquerors 
must in time become mixed with that of the conquered ; 
and the preservation of men for slaves and women for wives 
will always insure the continued existence of the inferior 
race, however much it may lose of its original appearance, 
manners, or language." x The pre-historic populations of 
the British Isles left traces for centuries upon our agricul- 
tural industry and village customs, so that the more detailed 
study and wider recognition of their survivals into modern 
times are not merely the idle interest of an unscientific 
curiosity. The strange persistence of early or inferior races 
and institutions amid the most devastating wars and most 
overwhelming invasions is one of the most remarkable 
features of history ; 2 and the intelligent recognition of this 
fact in recent times has done much to enlarge and correct 
our conceptions of human progress. Many an agricultural 
labourer of to-day shows in the cast of his features and shape 
of his head a continuity of descent from the pre-historic inhabi- 1 
tants of his native land beside which the pedigree traced from 
a Norman noble fades into the insignificance of modernity. 

§ 3. The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Britain. 

Now, at the earliest period to which the written records 
of classical writers take us back, there seems to have been 
living in Britain a population originating from no less than 
three stocks. "The civilised Gauls had settled on the 
eastern coasts before the Roman invasions began, and were 
to spread across the island before the Roman conquest was 
complete. The Celts of an older migration were established 
towards the north and west, and ruled from the Gaulish 
settlements as far as the Irish Sea ; and here and there we 
find traces of still older peoples who are best known as 
the tomb-builders and the constructors of the pre-historic 
monuments." 3 Of these three stocks the aboriginal was 

1 Elton, Origins, ch. i. 2 Of. Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, p. 331. 

3 Elton, Origins, p. 93. 



6 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

that of the Iberians or Ivernians, the oldest Neolithic race 
known in Europe, a small, dark-haired, dolichocephalic people. 
These were already retreating before an immigration of 
Celtic peoples, but seem to have also amalgamated with the 
immigrating race to a considerable extent, and, being thus 
preserved from absolute extinction, have survived to our 
own day. 1 These aborigines were known to the Eomans 
under the name of Silures, 2 and, like the Goidels of the 
first Celtic immigration, 3 were in the Neolithic stage of_ 



culture. Their industry and mode of life has been recon- 
structed for us with marvellous care and fidelity by the 
labours of Professor Boyd Dawkins. 4 He concludes that the 
population was probably large, and divided into tribal com- 
munities, who certainly possessed fixed habitations — not 
only caves, but log-huts and wooden houses — and, though 
living principally on their flocks and herds and the game 
of the vast forests, they were by no means unacquainted 
with the arts of agriculture. The implements by which 
their building and agricultural operations were carried 
on were only of stone, but they seemed to have been used 
very skilfully. Indeed, the use of the stone axe marks a 
distinct epoch in the history of industry, for by it man was 
enabled "to win his greatest victory over nature," by cut- 
ting down the trees of the vast primeval forests in order to 
make a clearing for tilling the ground and building his 
house. The arts of spinning and weaving 5 were also intro- 
duced into Europe and Britain in the Neolithic age, and 
were preserved, in the more remote districts, with but little 
variation until the quite modern introduction of more 
complicated machinery. Flint-mining and pottery-making 
were also carried on, and the art of boat-building 6 had pro- 
ceeded sufficiently to allow of voyages being made [in 
canoes] from France to Britain and from Britain to Ireland. 
It is also evident that the Neolithic tribes of Britain had 

1 Cf. Rhys, Celtic Britain, p. 275. — " Skulls are harder than consonants 
and races lurk behind when languages slink away. The lineal descendants 
of the Neolithic aborigines are ever among us, possibly even those of a 
still earlier race." 

2 Tac, Agric, c. xi. 3 Of. Rhys, Celtic Britain, p. 213. 

4 Early Man in Britain, ch. viii. p. 290. 5 lb. , p. 275, 6 lb. , p. 290. 



PRE-ROMAN BRITAIN 7 

commercial intercourse one with another, though of course 
only in the rude and primitive form of barter ; * for stone 
axes and other implements are found distributed over dis- 
tricts very far removed from the places in which they were 
made. That this sort of traffic was carried on over consider- 
able distances is also proved from the fact that axes of jade 2 
are found in Britain where that material was quite unknown. 

§ 4. Their Social and Economic Condition. 

The social condition of the people in this period seems to 
have been very much like that of the tribes of Central Africa 
at the present time. They were divided into tribal communi- 
ties, generally at war one with another, though each tribe 
probably obeyed its own chief, " whose dominion was limited 
to the pastures and cultivated lands protected by his fort, 
and extended but a little way into the depths of the forests, 
which were the hunting ground common to him and his 
neighbours." Each community inhabited a sort of clearing 
in the forests that overspread the land, and grew a few 
patches of flax for spinning or small-eared wheat for food ; 3 
but the flocks and herds must have constituted their chief 
property. From the possession of such property social 
differences must very early have arisen ; and the variation 
m the size and shape of their burial places goes to show 
that even in those pre-historic times property was by no 
means equally distributed. 

The flocks and herds here mentioned consisted of pigs, 
sheep, goats, and oxen, all of which were domesticated in 
the Neolithic period. Of oxen, two or three breeds were 
known in Europe, though in Britain " the small, delicately- 
shaped Celtic shorthorn " 4 was the sole domestic ox as late 
as the English conquest. In the fields there were no less 
than eight kinds of cereals (including varieties of wheat, 
barley, and millet) and " several of our most familiar 
seeds and fruits [e.g., peas, apples, pears, plums] grew in 
the Neolithic gardens and orchards," 5 though all were 

1 Cf. Solinus, c. 24, speaking of the Silures of Wales in Roman times : 
" They will have no markets or money, but give and take in kind, getting 
what they want by barter and not by sale." 

2 Early Man, p. 281. s lb., p. 272. 4 lb., p 297. 5 lb., p. 301. 



8 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

smaller and nearer to their wild forms than those now 
Jmown. Since this Neolithic age we have done little but 
progress on lines which the primitive workers of Britain and 
Europe began. " To the Neolithic peoples we owe the 
rudiments of the culture which we ourselves enjoy. The 
arts which they introduced have never been forgotten, and 
all subsequent progress has been built upon their foundation. 
Their cereals are still cultivated by the farmer, their 
domestic animals still minister to us, and the arts of which 
they possessed only the rudiments have developed into the in- 
dustries — spinning, weaving, pottery-making, mining — with- 
out which we can scarcely recognise what our lives would be." 1 

§ 5. The Bronze Age and the Celtic Immigration. 

The Neolithic age survived in remote parts of Britain 
almost unchanged into Eoman times, for the Silures who 
fought so desperately against the Romans in Wales were 
still in this stage of culture. 2 But, disregarding these 
exceptional tribes, it is clear that culture, civilisation, and 
industry all made vast and rapid strides when the Bronze 
age succeeded that of stone, and the little stone axes were 
superseded by those of metal. Whether the Celts of the 
first Celtic immigration brought implements and weapons 
of bronze with them, as Professor Boyd Dawkins seems to 
think, 3 or whether these Celts were, like the Iberians, still 
in the stone age of culture when they first came to Britain, 4 
it is certain that, before the second Celtic immigration took 
place the bronze age had long since begun. And the 
bronze axe marked a new epoch. The forest trees were 
now more easily cut down, and further clearings were made 
for agricultural operations. Wild animals became scarcer 
with the invasion of the forests, and men had to rely less 
upon the chase and more upon agriculture for their food. 
With the progress of agriculture came a step upward in 
civilisation. Habitations, too, became larger and were 
better built ; 5 the arts of spinning and weaving both flax 
and wool were carried on more successfully ; 6 the harvest 

1 Early Man, p. 308. 2 Elton, Origins, p. 138. 3 Early Man, p. 342. 
4 So Taylor, Origin of the Aryans, p. 128. 5 Early Man, p. 352. 

6 /Z>.,p. 359. 



PRE-ROMAN BRITAIN 9 

was now gathered with bronze reaping-hooks ; 1 and the 
smith became an important craftsman with a comparatively 
large array of tools. 2 Mining was now more easily carried 
on, and it is probable that Cornish tin, and Irish and 
Welsh gold, 3 were worked by the natives of Britain and 
found their way to the Greek and Phenician traders of the 
Mediterranean through Gaul to the port of Massilia. As 
yet these southern merchants had not yet ventured as far 
as our coasts, and the adventurous voyage of Pytheas (B.C. 
330 V) was yet to come. But the iD habitants of the 
Britain of this period were possessed of an appreciable 
degree of civilisation. "It is clear," says Elton, 4 " that they 
were not mere savages, or a nation of hunters and fishers, 
or even a people in the pastoral and migratory stage. The 
tribes had learned the simpler arts of society, and had 
advanced towards the refinements of civilised life. . . . 
They were, for instance, the owners of flocks and herds ; 
they knew enough of weaving to make clothes of linen and 
wool ; and without the potter's wheel they could mould a 
plain and useful kind of earthenware. The stone querns 
or hand-mills, and the seed-beds in terraces on the hills of 
Wales and Yorkshire, show their acquaintance with the 
growth of some kind of grain, while their pits and hut- 
circles prove that they were sufficiently civilised to live in 
regular villages." 

The Bronze age was succeeded by that of Iron, but the 
pre-historic Iron Age in Britain was probably of much 
shorter duration than that of bronze. 5 " It is represented 
principally by the contents of an insignificant number of 
tombs, and by numerous isolated articles." But now the 
small isolated communities of the Neolithic age are 
becoming welded together into larger bodies, obedient to 
one rule ; 6 civilisation becomes much higher, and commerce 

1 Early Man, p. 360. 2 lb., p. 385. 

3 lb., p. 421. 4 Origins, p. 145. 

5 Dr Evans places the beginning of the bronze age in Britain between 
1400 and 1200 B.C., and thinks that iron swords were used in the south of 
Britain soon after the fourth or fifth century B.C. In the third or second 
century B.C. bronze had practically fallen into disuse for cutting imple- 
ments. — Evans, Ancient Bronze Implements, pp. 471, 472. 

"^ Early Man, p. 426. 



io INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

increases, till at length we come out of the mists of antiquity 
into the clearer dawn of history, and the pre-historic period 
is at an end. 

§ 6. Resume : The Peoples of Early Britain. 
We have thus seen that originally, during the greater 
part of the stone age, Britain was inhabited by the short, 
dark, Iberian race, and that towards the end of that period 
it was invaded by a tall and fair Celtic people, who either 
brought with them, or before long acquired, implements 
and weapons of metal. 1 It is also probable 2 that there 
were two Celtic invasions of Britain, the first that of the 
Goidels, who spread into Scotland and Ireland, often amal- 
gamating with the aborigines, and the second that of the 
Brythones, who seized the more fertile portions of the 
island, in the south and south-east, and drove the others 
before them into the west and north. These Brythones 
included the Gaulish tribes mentioned by Caesar 3 as having 
crossed over from Belgic territories into Britain not very 
long before his own invasion of that country, " though there 
are signs that an immigration from Belgium had been pro- 
ceeding for several generations " previously. 4 There were 
thus, for some time before the Roman invasion of Caesar 
(B.C. 55), peoples of three different stocks living together 
in Britain. There were the more or less civilised Gauls in 
the eastern portions, who had come over long before the 
Roman period, and gradually, both before and during the 
Roman occupation, spread across the island in a northerly 
and southerly direction. Then there were, in the north 
and west of the island, the civilised Celts of an older 
migration, whose territories stretched from the Gaulish 
settlements to the Irish Sea, and included both Goidels and 
Brythones. And, lastly, here and there in many localities, 
among the other tribes, we constantly come upon survivors 
of the older and pre-historic tribes of a much remoter period. 

§ 7. Their Social and Economic Condition. 

It must not, however, be imagined that any uniform 

1 Taylor, Origin of Aryans, p. 80. 2 Rhys, Celtic Britain, p. 213, and map. 
3 B. G., ii. 4, and v. 14. 4 Elton, Origins, p. 102. 



PRE-ROMAN BRITAIN n 

description will apply to the industrial or social develop- 
ment of these different races. They were all in various 
stages of civilisation, and though commercial, and possibly 
social, intercourse between them was not uncommon, they 
remained for centuries with their distinguishing features 
unobliterated. The oldest races were in the pre-metallic 
stage ; l the British Celts were in the later Bronze period 
on their first arrival, and possibly became acquainted with 
the use of iron later, while the more recent Gaulish arrivals 
were certainly familiar with iron implements and weapons. 
We are prepared, therefore, to find great dissimilarity of 
culture among the varied population of Britain in the pre- 
Roman period. The oldest races were really little other 
than savages in their mode of life — at any rate, in those 
remote regions to which they had retreated before the 
successive Celtic invasions. Where they had come in con- 
tact with their more civilised neighbours they were, however, 
probably not so wild or degraded as the descriptions of 
Greek and Roman writers of that day seem to imply. 2 But 
they do not seem to have had regular towns, houses, or 
fields, though they kept flocks and herds. They depended 
very largely on hunting for their subsistence, and also on 
the natural products of the woods, such as wild fruits and 
nuts. Dion Cassius mentions their strange refusal to eat 
the fish with which British rivers were at that time swarm- 
ing, and it is curious to notice, as showing how pre-historic 
customs have persisted into our own time, that in certain 
Irish and Highland localities this prejudice still exists. 3 

§ 8. The Celts in the time of Pytheas. 
The condition of the Celtic invaders has already been 
alluded to in the remarks made above 4 on the industries of 
the Bronze Age, but we may here briefly add the informa- 
tion derived from the observations of the Greek explorer 
Pytheas, who started from the Greek colony of Massalia 
(Marseilles) about 330 B.C. to explore " the Celtic countries" 
of the north. He was commissioned by a committee of the 

1 Elton, Origins, p. 122. 

2 Cf. Dion Cassius (Xiphiline), lxxvi. 12 ; Claudian, B. Getic, 417 ; 
Solinus, c, 4. 3 Elton, p. 165. 4 Above, p. 8. 



12 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

Massalian merchants to discover the sources of the lucrative 
tin trade, the secret of which had hitherto been jealously 
guarded by the Carthaginians, who monopolised it. The nar- 
rative of his voyage is for us of peculiar interest, for its frag- 
ments contain the first notices of what was then an almost 
unknown land ; 1 while the fact that the Massalians thought 
the tin trade of such importance as to warrant the expense of 
an exploring expedition is a proof of the activity of the foreign 
commerce of pre-historic Britain. Pytheas, on reaching 
Britain, which he first touched on the shores of Kent, not 
only landed there, but travelled over part of the country on 
foot to collect information about the tin trade. He almost 
certainly went westward, passing through what is now 
Wiltshire and South Hampshire — then a great forest 
district — to Cornwall. " Here he found the country 
of the tin, which was dug out of the ground in mines 
with shafts and galleries. The people were very 
hospitable, their commerce with foreign merchants 
having civilised them and softened their manners." 2 The 
tin thus mined was carried six days' journey to an island 
called Ictis, 3 whence the traders from Gaul conveyed it across 
the Channel into Gaul, and finally down the Rhone in 
barges to Massalia. Besides tin-mining, Pytheas found a 
fairly considerable agriculture, observing " an abundance of 
wheat in the fields," though, owing to the moist nature of 
the climate and lack of regular sunshine, the sheaves had to 

1 The statements of Pytheas, recorded as they are only by his critics, 
have been received both in ancient and modern times with considerable 
scepticism, but there seems, after a careful review of them, little reason to 
doubt their substantial accuracy. See especially C. R. Markham's paper 
on Pytheas, the discoverer of Britain, in The Geographical Journal, Vol. I. 
No. 6, where his observations are vindicated from a geographical stand- 
point. 

2 Of. Diodorus Siculus, c. 22. This account was almost certainly taken 
from Timaeus, who derived it from Pytheas. 

3 Where "Ictis" was situated is still a subject of controversy. Elton 
thinks it was Thanet (p. 35-37), Sir E. Bunbury and Captain Markham 
think it was St Michael's Mount. Professor Rhys {Celtic Britain, 46, 47) 
inclines to Thanet. This latter view certainly explains Caesar's story 
that the tin " nascitur in mediterraneis regionibus," and also explains why 
Pytheas on touching the coast at Kent had to travel westwards, seeing on 
his way the temple of Stonehenge, very early reports of which reached the 
Greek. But Elton doubts his being in those parts. 



PRE-ROMAN BRITAIN 13 

be thrashed in " great barns." x The natives possessed also 
" cultivated fruits, a great abundance of some domesticated 
animals but a scarcity of others, and made a beverage from 
wheat and .honey," 2 the " metheglin " of some country dis- 
tricts in the present day. That the state of agriculture was, 
however, very backward in some districts (probably those 
occupied by the older inhabitants), we gather from Posi- 
donius, 3 who visited Britain in the first century B.C., and 
related that the " people have mean habitations made chiefly 
of rushes or sticks, and their harvest consists in cutting off 
the ears of corn and storing them in pits underground," 
using it from day to day. But, on the other hand, agricul- 
ture was well advanced in the Gaulish settlements of the 
South and East. "The British Gauls," says Elton, 4 "appear 
to have been excellent farmers, skilled as well in the pro- 
duction of cereals as in stock-raising and the management 
of the dairy. Their farms were laid out in large fields 
without enclosures or fences, and they learned to make a 
permanent separation of the pasture and arable, and to 
apply the manures which were appropriate to each kind of 
field. The plough was of the wheeled kind, an invention 
that superseded the old ' overtreading plough ' held down by 
the driver's foot." A remarkable proof of their advanced 
knowledge was shown in the practice of marling. " They 
relied greatly on marling anoTchalking thelanSr'TC'he same 
soil, however, was never twice chalked, as the effects were 
visible after standing the experience of fifty years. The 
effect of the ordinary marl was of even longer duration, the 
benefit being visible in some instances for a period of eighty 
years." Many varieties of marl were used — the lime-marl, 
chalk-marl, the red, dove-coloured, sandy, and pumice 
varieties being all mentioned by Pliny. They had two 
varieties of cattle — the small "Welsh breed or " Celtic short- 
horn " and the Kyloe or Argyllshire variety — as well as 
sheep, pigs, and fowls. 5 It is worthy of notice, in view of 
landed customs which we shall have to note in later times, 
that there is no trace among them of co-operative husbandry. 

1 Strabo, iv., v. 5. {Cas. 201). 2 lb. 3 See Diodorus, v. 21. 

4 Elton, pp. 115-116. 5 lb., pp. 116-117. 



14 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

The Gauls were likewise expert not only in agricultural but 
also in textile manufactures of a simple kind in cloth and 
linen. " They wove their stuffs for summer, and rough 
felts or druggets for winter wear, 1 which are said to have 
been prepared with vinegar, and to have been so tough as to 
resist the stroke of a sword. They had learned the art of 
using alternate colours for the warp and woof, so as to bring 
out a pattern of stripes and squares," and obviously of 
dyeing the materials. 

We see, then, from a survey of the various inhabitants of 
Britain in pre-Roman times, that they had reached in some 
parts a very fair degree of industrial development, especially 
in agriculture, though in other districts they were equally 
backward. Manufactures and mining 2 were in progress, 
and the latter had given rise to what must have been for 
those times a considerable foreign commerce, though this 
was confined to the southern coasts. It is not easy, 
perhaps, to gain a general survey of the country, because the 
conditions of culture in the various districts and among the 
different races were so diverse, and this diversity was at 
once a consequence and a cause of the difficulties of com- 
munication. But though we cannot in this period make 
any industrial generalisations, we may be certain that its 
industrial conditions left some marks on future ages, and 
that any consideration of post-Roman civilisation and customs 
— especially in the permanent and abiding influeDces of 
agriculture — must necessarily be imperfect if it fails to 
take into account the survivals of the pre-historic period. 

§ 9. Foreign Trade of Britain. 

It was the conquest of Gaul that brought the Romans of 
Julius Caesar's day close to the shores of Britain, and it was 
mainly from the reports of Gaulish traders that Caesar 
derived not only his knowledge of that country but also his 

1 Elton, pp. 110, ill. 

2 The tin districts of the time of Pytheas and Posidonius, i. e. in the third 
and first centuries B.C., are given by Elton, p. 33, as Dartmoor, the 
country round Tavistock and round St Austell, the southern coast of 
Cornwall, the district round St Agnes on the north coast, and between 
Cape Cornwall and St Ives. 



PRE-ROMAN BRITAIN 15 

desire to conquer it. The Romans evidently thought the 
conquest worth making for the sake of the possible wealth 
that might accrue from it, for the inhabitants of Britain 
were hardly formidable enough politically to threaten the 
Roman frontiers in Gaul. Probably they expected more 
from the island than they actually obtained, 1 and, as Elton 
remarks, 2 " the ultimate conquest was doubtless hastened by 
the dream of winning a land of gold and a rich reward of 
victory. " But although we may admit that the Romans 
entertained exaggerated hopes, we may glance for a moment 
at the actual state of trade in Britain in the days before 
their arrival. 

It is obvious, in the first place, that the Phenicians and 
Carthaginians, and — after the voyage of Pytheas — also the 
Greeks, would not have made their long and dangerous 
voyages to Britain for tin unless the supplies of that metal 
had been sufficiently large to make it well worth their 
while, especially as it was procurable also in Spain. Hence 
the British tin trade must have been of considerable 
dimensions for those times. It is equally obvious that the 
foreign traders must have brought other goods to exchange 
for tin, since the British were in that stage of civilisation when 
barter comes naturally to the uncommercial mind, and the 
use of coined money was little understood. 3 Besides tin, it is 
certain that the gold which is found with tin in Cornwall, 
and the silver which is also mingled with the lead, formed 
articles of export. Iron was also exported, 4 especially 
when the Gauls of the later immigration began to work 
vthe mines of the Weald of Kent. Besides metals, we find 
mention of agricultural and pastoral produce, corn and 
barley, cattle and hides ; and the trade in the special 
British breed of hunting dogs, 5 both with Gaul and Rome, 
was of some importance. The pearl fishery, of which we 
hear so much from Bede, was probably greatly exaggerated, 
since Tacitus mentions British pearls only to slight them, 
and it is improbable that it should not have continued till 

1 Tac, Agric, 12. 2 Origins, p. 293. 

3 For these imports, see p. 16. 4 Ctesar, B. G-., v. 12. 

5 Martial, Epigram, xiv. 200; Claudian, Stil., iii. 301. 



1 6 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

much later times if it had been lucrative. On the other 
hand, the slave trade was an important feature, especially- 
after the Eoman conquest. Among the most ancient 
articles of commerce was almost certainly amber, of which 
small quantities were found on certain portions of the 
British coast ; but the British supply is too small to account 
for the great quantity found in the tumuli} and hence it 
must have formed an important article of import from the 
North Sea and Baltic shores. Very probably the Phenician 
and other traders found it a useful medium of exchange, 
and under the Roman Empire the import from the Ostians 2 
was sufficient to bear a tax which yielded a small revenue. 3 
Ivory, bracelets (and certainly other ornaments), glass, and 
" such-like petty merchandise," are all mentioned by 
Strabo 4 as being imported, and his statements indicate the 
kind of trade that must have gone on for centuries before 
his time. Weapons of all kinds would find a ready sale in 
the island, while furs and the skins of wild animals, of which 
there were very large numbers in Britain, were exported. 
Speaking generally we may say that, although the Britains 
were able to manufacture implements, weapons, pottery, and 
clothing for themselves, yet the foreign trade was necessar- 
ily an exchange of foreign manufactured articles for raw pro- 
duce, and continued for many centuries to be of this nature. 

§ 10. Internal Trade: Roads and Rivers. 

The means of communication by which trade was carried 
on internally were the rivers, the " ridge ways " 5 or roads 
on the open ground at the top of ridges of hills — of which 
the High Street in the Lake district, afterwards a Roman 
road, is a very good example — and other rough tracks. The 
first road-makers were the wild animals migrating to early 
pastures and the savages who followed them. 6 But the place 
of rivers in the commercial history of the early and middle 
ages was most important, since, till good roads were made, 

1 Cf. Elton, p. 63. 

2 They occupied the district near the mouth of the Elbe, though Dr 
Latham places them further east. 

3 Strabo, iv. 278. 4 lb. 5 Social England, vol. i. p. 88. 
6 Thorold Rogers, Econ. Int. of History, p. 490. 



PRE-ROMAN BRITAIN i 7 

carriage by water was far less troublesome and expensive 
than by land/ and it has been well remarked 2 that the 
rivers Thames and Severn were of prime importance to the 
development of early British trade. 3 Down these rivers the 
British trader floated in his frail coracle or " curragh " 
of hides, and even ventured to cross over from the 
western coasts to Ireland. 4 The people of the southern and 
Cornish shore had, however, ships of oak of a much more 
seaworthy character, and evidently, from Caesar's account, 5 
were skilful and daring navigators. They traded chiefly 
with Northern and Western Gaul. 

§ 11. Physical Aspect of P re-Roman Britain. 

Having gained some idea of the industry and com- 
merce of early Britain, it is now time to glance briefly at 
the physical condition of the country which the Romans 
were about to conquer. We are struck at once by the fact 
that its appearance was vastly different from the aspect 
which it wears to-day. The typical English landscape of 
the present, with its smiling pasturage, neat hedges, and 
well-tilled fields, simply did not then exist, or, at any rate, 
was to be seen only in a few favoured spots. Whereas 
to-day the cultivable and cultivated area includes the 
greater part of the surface, it was at that time only a small 
fraction of it. Forests and scrub, fen, moor, and marsh 
occupied most of the land. u A cold and watery desert " is 
Elton's description of it, 6 and though his expression is 
exaggerated, it is nearer the truth than another writer's 
fanciful epithet 7 of a "land of sunshine and pearls." 
Britain was certainly far more rainy then than now, owing 

1 So, too, in Europe the main commercial routes followed in France the 
Rhine, and in Germany the Rhone and Danube ; see my Commerce in 
Europe, §§ 68, 69. 2 Social England, vol. i. p. 89. 

3 In this commerce coins were probably not much used, and it is supposed 
that no British coins were struck before 200 B.C., though some are said to 
appear to be " centuries older than Caesar's first expedition." Later on the 
various chiefs seem to have struck silver and other coins for their own 
tribes in imitation of Gallic and Roman money. Cf. Evans, Coins of the 
Ancient Britons, for a subject which we cannot discuss properly here. 

4 Elton, p. 232. 5 Caesar, B. G., iii. 9, 13. 

6 Origins, p. 218. 7 In Social England, vol. i. p. 89. 

B 



1 8 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

to the influence of the vast forests which covered the land, 
and consequently also it was more foggy. " The ground 
and atmosphere were alike overloaded with moisture. The 
fallen timber obstructed the streams ; the rivers were 
squandered in the reedy morasses, and only the downs and 
hill-tops rose above the perpetual tracts of wood." x It was 
these downs and hill-tops on which the earliest inhabitants, 
unable to clear the forests effectually with their feeble axes, 
necessarily practised the first elements of agriculture, 2 and 
it is here that their traces are most abundant. The 
gradual clearing away of the woodland in later, and especially 
in Roman, times drew the agriculturist down into the river 
valleys. The extent of forest was immense. In the South 
there were more than a hundred miles of the " And reds- 
weald " between Hampshire and the Med way, and many 
miles more in the opposite direction into Dorset and Wilt- 
shire. In the Severn valley was the forest of the Wyre, 
around the modern Worcester, extending right over 
Cheshire, and the forest of Arden nearly covered all 
Warwickshire. Another huge wood lay between London 
and the Wash ; the Midlands from Lincoln to Leicester 
and from the Peak to the Trent were occupied by miles of 
forest, of which Sherwood and Charnwood are only fractional 
and fragmentary remains. Yorkshire and Lancashire were 
wild wastes of moorland and scrub, and most of the country 
was regarded as a desert that lay between Derby Peak and 
the Roman Wall. 3 

The marshes and swamps were also of considerable extent 
in many low-lying parts that have since been drained and re- 
claimed. Notably this was the case with the Romney Marsh 
on the coast of Kent, which, when Caesar came to Britain, 
was a morass invaded every day by the tide as far as Roberts- 
bridge in Sussex. 4 The low-lying parts of Essex, Surrey, and 

1 Elton, p. 218. 

2 Green, Making of England, p. 8 ; and Gomme, Village Community, 
pp. 75-95, who deals fully with the "terrace cultivation" on the 
hills. 

3 The above description is based on Green's vivid picture in the 
Making of England, pp. 10-12. 

4 Elton, p. 103. 



PRE-ROMAN BRITAIN 19 

Kent below London were then "extensive flats covered 
with water at every tide," 1 and the Thames estuary invaded 
a district almost as large as the Wash. The valley of the 
Stour * was also covered by the sea for many miles above 
the present tidal limit, while the Wash extended north- 
wards nearly to Lincoln and westwards to Huntingdon and 
Cambridge. The lower reaches of the Trent formed 
another huge marsh, and its basin generally was one of the 
wildest and least frequented parts of the island. 2 

In this comparatively wild and uncultivated condition of 
the country, it is easy to believe that wild animals were 
exceedingly numerous. In fact, they existed till far into 
the period of modern history. Wolves and bears were met 
in the vast forests for centuries after the Roman and Saxon 
invasions, and only gradually became extinct. 3 The wild 
boar was very common, and so late as Henry II. 's reign was 
hunted on Hampstead Heath, where also were chased the 
wild cattle whose descendants are now regarded as curiosi- 
ties in the famous herd at Chillingham Park. A sign of 
the infrequency of human habitation in certain districts is 
seen in the numbers of beavers that built their colonies on 
the streams, remaining in remote parts till the twelfth 
century. 4 Indeed, it is evident that the Britain of pre- 
Roman days must have been, on the whole, a very wild and 
savage country, many parts of which had scarcely even been 
trodden by the foot of man. Yet, as we have seen, there 
were already in some places, especially in the South-East, 
many marks of civilisation and progress in industrial arts, 
and when the Romans came to the island they found many 
tribes and settlements that were considerably advanced in 
agricultural and domestic industries, though, on the other 

1 Airy, in Athenazum, 1683, on the Claudian Invasion of Britain. 

2 Making of England, p. 75. 

3 Martial {Epigr., vii. 34), mentions the Scotch bear, and Boyd Dawkins 
{Cave Hunting, p. 75), thinks the native British bear was not extinct till the 
tenth century a.d. Frequent mention of wolves is found in mediaeval docu- 
ments — e.g., in the account rolls of Whitby Abbey, temp. Ric. II., and 
they probably were not extinct in England till the end of the fifteenth 
century. (Newton, Zoology of Ancient Europe, p. 24), and in Scotland 
much later. 

4 Girald. Cambrensis, Itin. Wall, ii. 3. 



20 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

hand, there were others but little removed from savagery. 
We shall probably be right in supposing that the divergences 
of culture were very strongly marked, and that a considerable 
distinction was to be found between the skilled Gaulish 
farmer of Kent and the wild pre-Aryan inhabitants of the 
North and West. 



CHAPTER II 

ROMAN BRITAIN 

§ 12. The Roman Occupation. 

The two expeditions of Julius Csesar in the years 55 and 
54 B.C. — the first of which was certainly a failure and the 
second very nearly so — were followed by almost a century 
of repose from foreign invasion. It was not till ninety 
years after Caesar's earlier attempts that the Romans, led 
on this occasion by Aulus Plautius, and aided by German 
auxiliaries, again invaded Britain (a.d. 44). But this time 
they came to stay, and although the conquest proved 
perhaps more difficult than they had anticipated, it was 
under successive generals accomplished at last. The year 
70 A.D. may be taken, for convenience, as the date when 
the power of the most stubborn of the natives was effec- 
tually broken, and though much fighting remained to be 
done, the conquest was practically complete. For seventy 
years after the victories of Julius Agricola (a.d. 70-84) 
there was peace, and had it not been for the incursions of 
the Picts and Scots by land, and of the Saxon pirates by 
sea, the peace would have been almost uninterrupted. The 
Romans remained as the rulers of Britain for three centuries 
and a half, and then the exigencies of self-defence in other 
regions of the Empire compelled them to retire. The last 
legions left the island in 407 A.D. 1 

It is difficult to estimate the exact effect of their occu- 
pation. While some very able writers 2 have found reason 
to believe that it had lasting effects both on the political, 
municipal, industrial, and especially on the agricultural 
development of the country, others have regarded it merely 
as a military administration, similar (as we are told with a 
rather wearisome paucity of example) to that of the French 

1 Green, Making of England, p. 24. The date 410 a.d. is that of the 
letter bidding Britain provide for its own defence. 

2 As e.g. Coote, in his Romans in Britain. 



22 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

in Algeria. 1 It would probably be nearer the truth to 
compare the Roman position with that of the English in 
India, making due allowance for differences of civilisation 
and of policy. The Romans could no more settle in Britain 
on account of the cold than we can settle in India on 
account of the heat. So, too, if the English were to withdraw 
from India after three hundred years of occupancy (and 
they will probably retire before that period), the net effect 
of their presence would be much the same as that of the 
Romans here. The influence in both cases has been only 
skin deep, and though it touches the upper classes of the 
natives very effectually, it hardly affects the lower. Well- 
to-do British youths went to study and " see life " in Rome, 
just as well-to-do Hindu and Mahommedan youths come to 
London, and with much the same result. Prominent 
natives were occasionally entrusted in Britain with Roman 
administration, as they are similarly entrusted by us in 
India. After all, it is mainly the efforts of industry which 
survive. The customs, laws, and language disappear, and 
the roads and bridges remain. These, with a number of 
ruined fortresses, lighthouses, 2 drainage works, and towns 
which had sprung from camps, are the most important 
relics of the Roman occupation in Britain. 

§ 13. Roman Roads. 

We will speak of the roads first, because, especially now, 
in an age of railways, their importance cannot be over- 
estimated. They were not all by any means first built by 
the Romans, but represent in many cases adaptations of 
and improvements upon Celtic, or even still more ancient, 3 
roadways. The roadway over High Street, near Winder- 
mere, is such an one. But the main function of the Roman 
roads was, after all, military, and therefore we find them 
made sometimes more with a view to the military import- 
ance of certain strategic connections than to the require- 
ments of commerce. At the same time, after these roads 

1 Green, Making of England, p. 7, and Pearson, History of England, i. 55. 

2 As at Dover, and the Richborough beacon. 

3 Of. Thorold Rogers, Econ. Interpr. of History, p. 490. 



ROMAN BRITAIN 23 

had been once made, whatever their original purpose may 
have been, they were eagerly used by traders, who were 
also thankful for the military protection which the roads 
enjoyed. " The Roman plan," says Elton, 1 " was based on 
the requirements of the provincial government, and on the 
need for constant communication between the Kentish ports 
and the outlying fortresses on the frontiers." Hence several 
of the routes fell into comparative desuetude when the 
strategic need for them was gone, and only those which 
afforded the greatest facilities for commerce were kept up. 
The needs of industry frequently outlive those of war. In 
mediaeval times we find four great highways traversing the 
kingdom of England, and representing " a combination of 
those portions of the Roman roads which the English adopted 
and kept in repair, as communications between their prin- 
cipal cities." These four great highways were 2 : — 

(1.) Watting Street (to use its later name), from Kent 
to London, and then vid St Albans and Northampton to 
Chester and on to York, bifurcating then northwards to 
Carlisle and to near Newcastle. 

(2.) The Fosse Way, from the Cornish tin-mines through 
Bath and Cirencester to Lincoln, crossing Watling Street 
at High Cross between Coventry and Leicester. 

(3.) Ermin Street, a direct route from London to Lincoln 
through Colchester and Cambridge, and sending out 
branches to Doncaster and York. 

(4.) Ikenild or Ickenield Street, whose course is some- 
what obscure, and is often confused with Ryknild Street, 
which latter led from the Severn valley and Gloucester to 
Doncaster. The Ikenild Street came from Norwich and 
Bury St Edmunds to Dunstable, thence to Southampton, 
with branches to Sarum and the western districts. 

§ 14. Roman Toivns in Britain. 

Of these, which are commonly called the four Roman 
ways, the Ikenild Street was almost certainly an ancient 

1 Origins, p. 327, where the military system of roads is fully explained. 

2 Of. Elton, Origins, p. 326, and Guest, The Four Roman Ways, Archceol. 
Journ., xiv. p. 99, and also Cooper King in Social England, voL i. pp. 49-51, 
who adds others. 



24 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

British pathway, possibly adapted and used by the Romans, 
while Ermin Street is thought not to have been Roman 
south of Huntingdon. There was, however, an important 
Roman road from London to Richborough (Rutupiae) on 
the Kentish coast, then the chief military and commercial 
port for intercourse with Gaul, and strongly fortified, where 
on dark nights a beacon always shone to guide ships across 
the channel. Along all the roads there were frequent 
fortresses and stationary camps, and it is in many cases 
from these camps that our English towns have grown up. 1 
The towns were divided (constitutionally) into four classes, 
and the division helps us to understand their relative im- 
portance. First came the colonics, inhabited by Roman 
veterans, and enjoying the same laws and customs as 
Rome itself. There were nine of these — Richborough and 
Reculver, guarding the now filled-up channel of Thanet to 
the Thames ; London, an important trading centre from 
Celtic times ; Colchester ; Bath, then as now a noted 
sanatorium ; and Gloucester, Caerleon-on-Usk, Chester, 
Lincoln, and Chesterfield, all of military importance. Next 
came the niunicipia, where the inhabitants had the rights 
of Roman citizens, making their own laws and electing 
their own magistrates. There were only two of these — 
York, the northern capital, quite as important in those 
times as London ; and Yerulamium (St Albans), which 
guarded the entrances to the Midlands. Third in order 
came those towns, ten in number, which had the Latin 
right and elected their own magistrates, and lastly came 
the stipendiary towns, which were governed by Roman 
officials, and had to pay tribute. This class included all 
towns not mentioned above — that is to say, nearly the 
whole population of Britain. 2 

It has been truly said that " the type of every Roman 
city was the camp," 3 but it is equally true that " a Roman 
camp was a city in arms," 4 in which the soldiers corresponded 
to the colonists and settlers of more modern times. "The 

1 About 218 Roman stations are known in Britain. Soc. England, vol. i. 
p. 62. 

2 Lingard, Hist, of Eng., i. p. 50; Wright, Celt, Roman, and Saxon. 

3 Pearson, Hist, of Eng., i. 43. 4 Elton, Origins, p. 310. 



ROMAN BRITAIN 25 

ramparts and pathways of the camps developed into walls 
and streets, the square of the tribunal into the market- 
place, and every gateway was the beginning of a suburb, 
where straggling rows of shops, temples, rose-gardens, and 
cemeteries were delivered from all danger by the presence 
of a permanent garrison. In the centre of the town stood 
a group of public buildings, containing the court-house, baths, 
and barracks, and it seems likely that every important place 
had a theatre or a circus for races and shows." l There 
were fifty-nine towns 2 that might be called Roman, but the 
bulk of the population was engaged in agriculture and re- 
sided in the country districts, and therefore it is to rural 
industry that we must now turn our attention. 

§ 15. The Romans and Agriculture. 

It seems doubtful whether the Romans ever settled in 
sufficient numbers to alter permanently the conditions of 
agricultural industry, except in a few very favourable neigh- 
bourhoods. In the first place the climate was against 
them, just as it is against the English in India, though 
from a totally different reason. Just as no Englishman 
could tolerate life in India without the ever-moving punkah, 
so no Roman could reside in his English villa unless it was 
carefully heated by hot-water pipes. 3 Nor did the land offer 
a chance of making great wealth. " The great number of 
villas *vhose remains can still be traced is a proof that the lords 
of the soil were in easy circumstances, while the fact that 
the structures were commonly of wood, raised upon a brick or 
stone foundation, is an argument against large fortunes." i The 
surface of the country, too, was still wild and unreclaimed 
in many parts, and not suitable for advanced agriculture. 
The rivei-valleys, which contain a richer and more fertile 
soil, were only gradually being cleared of the primeval 
forest that encumbered them, for it is a significant fact that 
it is mainly in the natural clearings of the uplands that the 
population concentrated itself at the close of the Roman 
rule, and it is over these districts that the ruins of the 

1 Elton, Origins, p. 311. 2 Marcianus, Heracleota, ii. 14. 

3 Green, Making of England, pp. 7 and 45. 

4 Pearson, History of England, i. 52 



26 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

villas or country houses of the Roman landowners are most 
thickly planted. 1 Besides all this, the distance of Britain 
from the centre of the Roman world was sufficient to pre- 
vent a large influx of Roman settlers, and hence it is not at 
all surprising to find that most of the Roman monuments 
and inscriptions in our island refer mainly to matters of a 
military and official character. 

At the same time there can be no doubt that those dis- 
tricts where the few Roman settlers did build their villas 
must have enjoyed many industrial advantages over the 
more barbarous portions of the island. Traces of those 
villas, 2 with their Italian inner courts, colonnades, and 
tesselated pavements are still found, the household buildings 
being surrounded by an outer wall, against which were pro- 
bably built the rude huts of the British peasantry or serfs who 
tilled the foreigner's land. But it is not certain that these 
Roman farmers were responsible for the peculiar feature? 
that afterwards distinguished English agricultural and 
manorial life, and very possibly too much importance has 
been attached to Roman influence in this respect. It is 
going too far to say that, during the Roman period, " Eng- 
land became an agricultural country," and that " the agri- 
cultural system then established remained during and after 
the barbarian invasions." 3 We know that even befora the 
arrival of Csesar the Gallic Britons of the south-east were 
comparatively good farmers (p. 13), and it is sufficient to 
admit that their agriculture was further developed after the 
Roman conquest, without assuming the introduction of the 
Roman agricultural system. 

The majority of the remains of Roman villas are found 
in the southern counties, 4 and, however great their influence 
undoubtedly was here, it did not extend very far into the 
interior. The fact that Britain became celebrated for its 
export of corn 5 may be taken in more than one way. Some 
have regarded it as a proof of good agriculture under Roman 
influence, others as merely showing that the population was 

1 Green, Making of England, p. 9. 

2 Wright, Celt, Roman, and Saxon, p. 243 and pp. 227 sq. 

3 Ashley, Introduction to Coulanges' Origin of Property in Land, p. xxiv. 

4 Professor Ashley mentions this himself, p. xxvi. 5 Cf. ib., p. xxv. 



ROMAN BRITAIN 27 

so small that it could not consume all the corn it grew. In 
any case, " the great private estates surrounding the villas 
of wealthy landowners, and. cultivated by dependants of 
various grades — coloni, freedmen, and slaves " 1 — cannot 
have been numerous enough to influence the agricultural 
development of the country as a whole. Had this been the 
case, we should almost certainly find, more traces than we 
do of the Roman implements of husbandry, 2 which are well- 
known and continue in use at the present day, with very 
little difference in their structure, in those countries where 
Roman influence was most deeply felt. But, as a matter 
of fact, as Mr Seebohm shows, 3 though he draws a different 
conclusion therefrom, one of the main features of English 
husbandry was the plough-team of eight oxen, common to the 
agriculture of England, Wales and Scotland, but certainly 
not Roman in origin. Moreover, the remains of the home- 
steads and houses of early English villages show us that 
Roman influence never extended very markedly into agri- 
cultural buildings. " The villager in his wattle and daub, 
and the lord in his oak-rooted hall, carry us back to primi- 
tive economics within which there is no room for the great 
commercialism of the Roman world," 4 and it is a significant 
fact in this connection that the art of making bricks, and 
building in brick, introduced by the Romans, was never 
taken up by the agricultural population as a whole, but 
became extinct after the Roman occupation till its revival in 
the fifteenth century. 5 

§ 16. Celtic and Non-Roman Influence in Agriculture. 

The same conclusion — that the Roman occupation had 
little practical influence with the agricultural industry of the 
country, except in a few favoured districts 6 — is forced upon 

1 Ashley, as above, p. xxv. 

2 E.g. the wheel-plough ; cf. Gomme, Village Community, p. 277. 

3 Seebohm, Village Community, p. 388. 

4 Gomme, Village Community , p. 46. 

5 Thorold Rogers, Econ. Interp. of Hist. , p. 279. 

6 The extent of the Romanised area is often exaggerated. The North 
and West were almost untouched by Romans, and no villas are found 
north of Aldborough in Yorks. See F. T. Richards in Social. England , 
i. p. 24. 



28 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

/us again by a review of the philological and ethnological 
J evidence, which has hitherto been almost disregarded by 
economic historians. Where Eoman power was greatest in 
Britain was in the creation of a national government. It 
hardly so much as entered the life of the agricultural village 
communities, 1 in which, in spite of the influence of the 
Romanised towns, the mass of the population of Britain 
continued to dwell from the first dawn of civilisation till the 
advent of the factory system and its concomitants. Rome had 
probably no more effect on the agricultural life of the people 
of Britain than England has on the methods of the peasant 
population of India, and when we hear that Britain exported 
large quantities of corn in the Roman era, we merely note 
that India exports equally large quantities to England at the 
present day, without inferring therefrom that the Hindu ryot 
has adopted English agricultural methods. The agricultural 
history of our country begins, not with the Roman invasion, 
but with the pre-historic efforts of those ancient hill-tribes, 2 
whose industrial relics still remain for our investigation, and 
who cultivated their hill-sides in terraces, because these 
were the only clearings that emerged from the all-pervading 
primeval forest. This is the reason why the population, 
even at the close of the Roman period, was most numerous 
in the uplands. 3 The hillmen gave way to the Celts, 
though their traces are still among us, and the Celts, with 
their superior culture, developed agriculture probablj almost 
up to the level at which it was found at the Saxon conquest, 
and at which it remained for many centuries afterwards. 
The philological evidence on this point is of considerable 
interest. An extraordinary number of words in our 
present language referring to agricultural implements and 
industry are of Celtic origin, and those are said to be " not 
a twentieth of what might be alleged." 4 A few instances 

1 Cf Gomme, ut supra, p. 133. 

2 For a careful investigation of this evidence see Gomme, Village Com- 
munity, pp. 71, 83-95. 3 Green, Making of England, p. 8. 

4 Garnett, in the Journal of the Philological Society, i. 171. Among 
others he instances : — bran (skin of wheat), cabin, gusset {cf Welsh, cwysed, 
ridge or furrow), threave (a bundle of sheaves, W., drefa), bill, fleam (W., 
fiaim, a cattle lancet), wain, wall, trace, stook (of corn), gavelock (a fork), 
park ( = a field), filly, fog ( = fog-grass), basket, &c, &c. Measures of 



ROMAN BRITAIN 29 

are given in the footnote, and it should also be noticed, as 
showing the permanence of ancient populations in the rural 
districts, that many rural or " provincial " terms 1 are Celtic 
in origin. The survivals of curious customs connected with 
land, and the evidence of folk-lore generally, must be left to 
the archaeologist ; 2 but the student of industrial history 
cannot fail to notice the persistence of ancient populations, 
even in a subject condition, and their influence upon indus- 
trial life. Very possibly it is to this persistence that the 
backwardness of English agriculture for so many centuries 
is largely due. Learning little from the Roman, the 
native inhabitants of Britain had little to teach the Saxon. 
Even now, at the close of the nineteenth century, in the 
remoter districts of Ireland the heir of centuries of Celtic 
civilisation may be seen ploughing with his rude plough 
fastened to his horse's tail, 3 while in the Isle of Man a 
farmer of the present generation sacrificed one of his cattle 
at the cross roads to cure a plague which was destroying 
the others. 4 The ethnological evidence has of late been 
carefully studied, and distinct traces of an earlier (n on- Aryan) 
population have been found in many places, the distin- 
guishing characteristics of this early race being their dark 
hair, dark eyes, dark skin, and small stature. Such traces 
are seen in such varying localities as the counties compris- 
ing the ancient Siluria — Glamorgan, Brecknock, Mon- 
mouth, Radnor, and Hereford — in Cornwall and Devon, 
and in Gloucester, Wiltshire, and Somerset. 5 We may 

grain show Celtic origin — e.g., windle (Lanes, dialect for a measure, from 
W., gwyntell, a basket) hoop (Yorks. for a quarter peck), hattock (Yorks. 
for a shock of corn), peck {cf. W., peg). Also flannen (Hereford for 
flannel), frieze, brat (Yorks. for "pinafore," cf. W., brat = clout ; rag), mesh 
{cf W., masg, a stitch), borel (O.E. for coarse cloth, cf. bureler), lath, &c, 
may be instanced for textile industry. Probably a careful investigation of 
rural dialects would furnish many more. 

1 Besides provincialisms given above, cf. Yorks. toppin, a crest or ridge ; 
sile, a strainer ; Northern stool;, a shock of corn ; Somerset, soc, a plough- 
share, on which last cf. Schrader, Sprachvergleichung (Eng. trans.), p. 288. 

2 Cf. Gomme, ut supra, chs. v. and vi. 

3 The author heard this stated publicly by a Notts farmer who was an 
eye-witness during a visit to Ireland. 

4 Walpole, Land of Home Rule, p. 190 n. This farmer was alive in 1893. 

5 Elton, Origins, p. 137, with which cf. the note on p. 57 of Cunning- 
ham's English Industry and Commerce, vol. i. 



30 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

expect to find survivals in the west, but it is more 
surprising to discover them still existing in the eastern 
fen country and in the Midlands — especially round about 
Derby, Stamford, Leicester, and Loughborough 1 — for 
here we know, from place names and other evidence, 
that the Saxon and Danish conquerors settled in over- 
whelming numbers. But this merely proves how hard it 
is to destroy a subject population, 2 and if the non- Aryan, 
pre-Celtic inhabitants of early Britain have thus sur- 
vived, a fortiori must we make allowance for the survival 
of the Celtic races who succeeded and conquered them, only 
to be in turn conquered themselves. The Celtic race, in 
spite of some modern appearances to the contrary, possesses, 
under certain circumstances, 3 a considerable power of amal- 
gamation with other races without entirely losing its dis- 
tinctive characteristics. They amalgamated as conquerors 
with the Iberians, 4 and as conquered with the Saxon and 
Scandinavian, 5 and the most recent historian of the Isle 
of Man, where their influence is so strongly marked, has 
called attention to their place in the history of culture. 
"We live in a time when the Celtic race is gradually 
disappearing. Those parts of Europe where Celtic blood 
is predominant are those where population is decreasing (as 
in Ireland) or with difficulty maintained (as in France). 
Yet we ought not, in consequence, to forget the great part 
which the Celt has played in history, or the influence which 
the Celt has exercised in the civilisation of the world." 6 
Hitherto, certainly, the economic historian has neglected to 
note his influence 7 upon English agriculture, an influence 
which, though at first in favour of progress up to a 
certain point, was probably afterwards rather conservative 

1 Elton, u. s. 

2 Cf also S. Walpole, Land of Home Rule, p. 14, and also p. 21, for de- 
scription of the Celtic and Iberian population as existing in the undisturbed 
isolation of the Isle of Man in Roman times. 

3 As now in the United States. 4 Walpole, ib., p. 14. 

5 Strikingly so in the Isle of Man, which affords a very favourable field 
for ethnological study; cf. Walpole, ib., p. 76. 6 lb., p. 41. 

7 Though some admit the survival of many of the Celtic and pre-Celtic 
population (cf. Ashley, preface to F. de Coulanges' Origin of Property in 
Land, p. 36), they forget the influence which these must have exercised. 



ROMAN BRITAIN 31 

or even retrogressive. If it is true, as Professor Ashley- 
puts it, 1 that " under the Celtic, and therefore under the 
Roman, rule, the cultivating class was largely composed of 
the pre-Celtic race," and that " the agricultural population 
was but little disturbed," 2 it seems clear that the economic 
influence of such a population must have been very marked. 
Such indeed we shall find afterwards to be the case, when 
we come to investigate more closely the manorial system as 
it appeared in Anglo-Saxon and Norman times. 

§ 17. Commerce and Industry in Roman Britain. 

But before proceeding to the Saxon period we must in 
conclusion give a short glance at trade and industry under 
the Romans. The pax Bomana allowed both to develop 
as far as they were at that time likely to do, and, though 
never a rich country, in this early time 3 Britain was cer- 
tainly not a land of poverty. Agriculture went on, as it 
had done before the Romans came, 4 and as it was sure to do 
under a peaceful regime, while mining seems to have been 
even more vigorously carried on than of old. Lead was 
mined in the Mendip Hills, Derbyshire, and elsewhere, and 
became so abundant that its output was limited by law ; 
copper in Anglesey and Shropshire ; iron in the Forest of 
Dean, Hereford, and Monmouth ; coal, though only for 
home use, in Northumberland ; and in some parts a little 
silver, 5 The roads also threw those parts of the country 
through which they passed open to trade and intercourse, 
though on the other hand in later periods nothing is more 
striking than the self-contained character of the villages, 
and their comparative isolation one from the other. 6 The 
harbours of the south and south-east coast did a busy trade 
with Gaul, whose merchants acted as intermediaries between 
Britain and the outer world. The chief British exports 
seem to have been, besides corn and the minerals already 

1 Ashley, preface to F. de Coulanges' Origin of Property in Land, p . 37. 

2 Gf also Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. xxxviii. 

3 Gf. F. T. Richards in Soc. England, vol. i. p. 93. 

4 Gf. 0. M. Edwards in Social England, vol. i. p. 87. 

5 F. T. Richards in Social England, vol. i. p. 92. 

6 Gf. the case of Bampton, quoted by Gomme, V. G., p. 160. 



32 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

referred to, cattle and sheep, the skins and furs of wild 
animals, wild beasts themselves for the Eoman games, 
hunting dogs, and a large number of slaves. Kentish oysters 
were also known in Rome. Most of the ordinary clothing 
and textile fabrics for domestic use were made in the island 
itself, 1 and so too were the coarser kinds of pottery, and 
great quantities of bricks and tiles. The imports consisted 
of a limited supply of the finer kinds of cloth and pottery 
for the use of the upper classes, of wine, and ivory, amber, 
and all kinds of metallic ornaments. 2 Exports were almost 
certainly in excess of imports, since, like all provinces sub- 
ject to the Roman rule, Britain had to pay heavy taxes to 
its conquerors. These included the tributum, or property and 
income-tax ; the annona, a fixed quantity of corn for the 
Roman armies in Britain and on the Continent ; and 
portoria, or import duties. 3 The collection of the last- 
named was made at the harbours with which our coasts 
abounded, 4 though the fact that these harbours were so 
numerous, and the ships of that time so light that they 
could run in almost anywhere, probably caused a large 
amount of smuggling. In this connection it should be 
noticed that many towns standing on rivers, now inac- 
cessible to our large ships, were used as ports for sea-going 
vessels, both in Roman and in mediaeval times. Such were 
Exeter, Lincoln, Nottingham, York, and a host of others. 5 
The rivers themselves also formed natural highways into 
the interior, which were used far more then than now 6 in 
proportion to the amount of trade carried on. As regards 
the population, it is impossible to form an exact estimate. 
Cassar 7 speaks of " an infinite number of people" as living 

1 They also knew how to dye these in purple, scarlet, and other colours. 
Pliny, Hist. Nat., xvi. 8 ; xxii. 26. 

2 The Britons were very fond of these, using brass and iron, if they could 
not get gold. Social England, vol. i. p. 103. 

3 F. T. Richards in Social England, vol. i. p. 21. A five per cent, legacy 
duty was also levied on those who had the Roman franchise. 

4 Euminius, Pan. Constant., c. 11. and cf. "Innumerable ports, some 
since silted up and forgotten, some perhaps buried in the German Ocean." 
Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 153. 

5 Social England, vol. i. p. 205. 

6 Cf. examples of their use in Continental traffic in my Commerce in 
Europe, §§ 68, 69, and cf. § 26. 7 Caesar, B. G., vi. 12. 



ROMAN BRITAIN 33 

in the south-east, and the story of the sack of Verulamium, 
when 70,000 Romans are said to have been massacred, 1 
although the number is probably exaggerated, yet shows 
that the towns at least were populous. The condition of 
agriculture and trade also, which was more flourishing than 
it became for some time after the Saxon conquests, would 
lead us to suppose a fairly numerous population, though the 
unreclaimed and wooded nature of much of the country 
prevented it from being by any means dense. But, on the 
whole, it was a fairly flourishing province and people on 
which the Saxons descended. 

1 Tacitus, Ann., xiw 33. 



CHAPTER III 

THE SAXON PERIOD 

§ 18. The Saxon Invasions. 

The development of Roman Britain, after proceeding for 
three and a half centuries, was gradually checked by the 
weakness of the Roman power. As everyone knows, Rome 
had in the fifth century enough to do in defending the 
Continental portions of her empire without troubling about 
an outlying province like Britain. The Romans were 
compelled to leave Britain to its fate, and their legions 
had to quit its shores. But years before they went the 
Eastern and South-Eastern coast of the island had been 
harried by pirates of Teutonic race, "the second wave of 
the Aryans," and a special officer had to be appointed to 
keep them in check. He was known as the Count (Gomes) 
of the Saxon shore, 1 and had command of a squadron and a 
line of nine forts extending from Brancaster on the Wash to 
Pevensey on the coast of Sussex. Besides these Saxon 
pirates, the Picts and Scots raided the country, venturing on 
one occasion (368 A.D.) as far /■south as the banks of the 
Thames, and, thus harassed both by sea and land, the un- 
fortunate Britons might well cry out, " The barbarians drive 
us to the sea ; the sea to the barbarians ; we are massacred 
or must be drowned." 

In course of time the barbarians conquered the country. 
The conquest was the result not of one but of a series of 
invasions and expeditions, which, beginning at first as mere 
piratical raids, assumed by the middle of the fifth century 
the more serious aspect of victorious colonisation and mi- 
gration. 2 Into the details of that conquest we have not 
time to go, but it has been picturesquely and minutely 

1 I.e., the shore infested by the Saxon pirates, not that colonised by the 
Saxons, as some think. Cf. Stubbs, Const. Hist. , I. c. iv. p. 19, and Free- 
man, Norman Conquest, I. p. H. 2 Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. iv. p. 59 f 



THE SAXON PERIOD 35 

described by the graphic author of the Making of England. 
It is, however, interesting to note that the expeditions of 
the Saxon invaders were, as much perhaps from the nature 
of the country as from the manner of their inception, inde- 
pendent and separate one from the other. When the " East 
Saxons " landed in Essex, proceeding as they did up the 
valleys of the Colne and Stour, they found a junction with 
the invaders of Kent (even had they wished one) blocked 
by a gigantic forest, which prevented further progress south- 
ward. 1 But, leaving the manner and details of the con- 
quest to others, it is of prime importance to the economic 
historian to discover how far the Saxons destroyed or left 
undisturbed the inhabitants of the conquered country. Here 
we come at once to disputed ground. Some have thought 
that they practically made a clean sweep of all the institu- 
tions, both Roman and British, which they found, and 
began history afresh with Teutonic customs and manners 
both in political and industrial life. 2 " The Britons fled 
from their homes ; 3 whom the sword spared famine and 
pestilence devoured : the few that remained either refused 
or failed altogether to civilise the conquerors." This view 
is based upon the exaggerated statements of mere ecclesi- 
astical historians like Bede and Gildas, who had a natural 
prejudice against the heathen Saxons, and wished to draw a 
dark picture of the sufferings of their church. It is adopted 
also by those who like to make picturesque generalisations 
from striking but insufficient data, and who take the utter 
devastation of places like Andredes-Ceaster as typical of 
what happened to the whole country. 4 A truer view is that 
which, while admitting the disappearance of many of the 
upper class, the Romans and Romanised Britons, infers from 
a number of very different facts the survival of the great 
mass of the British population. " The common belief that 
the Celtic population of Britain was exterminated or driven 
into Wales and Brittany by the Saxons has absolutely no 

1 Epping and Hainault forests are its relics now. Cf. Airy, Hist, of 
Eng. iV . 9. 

2 So Stubbs, I. iv. p. 61, who heads one paragraph "general desolation." 

3 lb. 

4 So Green, whose judgment seems here at fault, Short History, pp. 10, 
11 ; and his numerous followers — e.g., Airy, Hist. o/Eng., p. 10. 



36 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

foundation in history " ; x and the great Gibbon, fully as he 
describes the havoc wrought by the Saxons in art, religion, 
and political institutions, carefully points out that this does 
not imply the extirpation of the subject population itself. 
<( Neither reason nor facts," he says, " can justify the un- 
natural supposition that the Saxons of Britain remained 
alone in the desert which they had subdued. After the 
sanguinary barbarians had secured their dominion, it was 
their interest to preserve the peasants as well as the cattle 
of the unresisting country. In each successive revolution 
the patient herd becomes the property of its new masters, 
and the salutary compact of food and labour is silently 
ratified by their mutual necessities." 2 Or, as a less cele- 
brated author concisely puts it, the object of the Saxon 
invaders was not " to settle in a desert, but to live at ease, 
as an aristocracy of soldiers, drawing rent from a peaceful 
population of tenants." 3 and we may add, as time went on, 
assisting in the calm pursuits of peace themselves. 

The facts of archaeology, ethnology, and language, to some 
of which we have already referred, and the curious survivals 
and customs of the manorial system, to which we shall come 
presently, bear out this supposition. It is certain, for 
instance, that there is a large proportion of Celtic and pre- 
Celtic blood in the population even of the east of England as 
well as of the west, and the English language itself, which has 
been called " the tongue of one people spoken by another," 
is regarded by some as further confirmatory evidence. 4 
Women and slaves were sure to have been kept alive rather 

1 Pearson, Hist. ofJEJng., I. p. 99. 2 Decline and Fall, ch. xxxviii. 

3 Pearson, Hist, of Eng., I. p. 101. Cf. also Ashley (preface to F. de 
Coulanges' Origin of Property in Land, p. 32.), "the destruction of 
Roman or Romanised landowners is not inconsistent with the undisturbed 
residence upon the rural estates of the great body of actual labourers." 

4 F. York Powell in Social England, Vol. I. p. 132. On the other hand, 
Prof. Cunningham, Growth of Industry, &c, Vol. I. p. 60, thinks there 
must have been "a general displacement of population to allow of the 
introduction of a new speech " ; but there are plenty of historical cases to 
prove the contrary. There is no general law regulating the survival of 
languages ; sometimes that of the conqueror, sometimes that of the con- 
quered prevails. Cf. Walpole, Land of Home Rule, p. 76, and Taylor, 
Origin of the Aryans, p. 209. The Celtic language did not prevail in 
France, though the Celtic race has remained, The destruction of the 



THE SAXON PERIOD 37 

than uselessly massacred ; and, in fact, we may readily 
believe that the land was continuously tilled " in the same 
fashion and chiefly by people of the same stock " from the 
time when the Romans came, or before it, till the close of 
the middle ages and the more modern changes in agriculture. 1 
It has been well observed that whereas the Roman settler 
always remained outside the life of the British village com- 
munity, the Saxon forced his way into it, 2 and the whole 
development of English social and industrial history is 
dominated by this fact — the intrusion of a conquering element 
into a conquered community. 3 Thus the manor, as we shall 
see, presents to us two main elements, the seigneurial and 
communal, the relations of tenants to their lord and to each 
other. The only difficulty is to distinguish the origin of each. 

§ 19. The Saxon Village and its Inhabitants. 

For the present, let us glance at the inhabitants of the 
ordinary English village as we find them much later when 
the struggles of invader and invaded have ceased, and both 
are living peacefully together. It is at the village that 
we must look, not at the town, for the Saxon disliked 
urban life and was essentially a dweller in villages. 

The divisions of its inhabitants have been admirably 
summarised by Mr York Powell 4 in the following manner : 
First came the gentry, including the thegen (landlord or 
<: squire ") and parish priest. The thegen lived on his own 
land and paid for it by special duties to the king, to whose 
following (comitatus) he belonged ; the priest also lived 
on the land — i.e., the glebe with which his patron (probably 
the thegen) had endowed the village church. Next came 
the farmer-class of yeomen or geneats, corresponding to 

Christian religion, on which, with others, Freeman and Cunningham also 
rely to prove the disappearance of the pre-Saxon population, means very 
little. Nothing is more frequent than change of religion by half- civilised 
peoples, as witness the triumphs of Islam, while, on the other hand, the 
Christian Church in Roman Britain was only the religion of the few, and 
the extent of its influence has been greatly exaggerated by the interested 
statements of ecclesiastical historians. 

1 York Powell, ut supra. 2 Gomme, Village Community, pp. 41, 60, 147. 

3 Gf. Vinogradoff, Villeinage, p. 303, who implies this, though not in so 
many words. 4 Social England, Vol. I. p. 124. 



38 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

tenant-farmers, freemen who farmed their own land, or 
perhaps farmed their lord's, working for the landlord as well 
as paying rent to him. Thirdly came the peasant class of 
cotsetlas, or cottagers, and geburs or copyholders, the 
former being labourers with five acres of land to support 
them instead of receiving wages, and the latter copyholders 
bound to heavy services or " task-work " for their lord. 
The fourth class were the labourers, such as herdsmen, 
barnkeepers, and woodwards, who were serfs, and were paid 
partly in food and clothes, and partly, if they were village 
officials, by certain perquisites and dues. Distinct from 
them were the free village tradesmen, such as the hunter, 
fowler, smith, carpenter, potter, pedlar, and travelling 
merchants, 1 who either took service under a lord or pur- 
sued their occupation independently. 

We have, therefore, here several classes whom we may 
classify as follow : — ■ 

I. Gentry (" of gentle rank "), including (1) the thegen, 
(2) the priest. 

, II. Freemen, including (1) the geneat, and (2) the 
tradesmen. 

III. Unfree men, including (1) the cotsetla, (2) the 
gebur, (3) the labourers and serfs. 

To which we should add, as quite distinct from the 
others, the small class of slaves (not serfs), such as the 
women-servants and menials about the house of the squire 
or yeoman. These formed a small, and, as time went on, 
a diminishing class, though for centuries the export trade 
in slaves was a dismal feature of English commerce. 

§ 20. Village Life. 

The life of the villages was very much the same in 
Anglo-Saxon times as it has always been in agricultural 
districts, and must, in its broad features, always continue 
to be. We need only make allowances for differences of 
degree in agricultural progress. It is very fully pictured 
to us in the illuminated manuscripts of the period, and in 

1 Those, of course, had their houses in some town, but travelled from 
village to village selling their wares. 



THE SAXON PERIOD 39 

the Bayeux tapestry. The early part of the year was taken 
up with ploughing, digging, and sowing, and the approach 
of the lambing season ; then came the hay and grain 
harvest and sheep-shearing ; while the autumn brought 
with it extensive preparations for winter in the way of 
killing and salting cattle for food in the winter months 
and storing wood for fires. During the winter itself 
threshing and winnowing went on, and most of the 
smith's and carpenters work was postponed till then, while 
in the houses the women were busy weaving and making 
rough and homely garments for their men. The most 
noticeable features in rural life from these early times 
right up to the sixteenth century, and even later, were 
the absence of winter roots for cattle, and of coal for their 
masters. Roots, and even carrots and parsnips, were then 
unknown to the farmer, 1 and it was consequently impos- 
sible for him to keep his cattle through the cold weather. 
Hence they had to be killed and salted, and could never 
attain to the excellence of our modern breeds. The absence 
of coal involved the use of large quantities of firewood in 
our cold climate, and hence there was a continual and in- 
creasing encroachment upon the forests. Fish and game 
were fortunately plentiful, and helped to relieve the 
monotony of salt meat, and eels were a very favourite food, 2 
being found in greater numbers then than now owing to 
the numerous fens and marshes that occupied so many 
districts. Though it was impossible to keep cattle in any 
great numbers through the winter, oxen were used for 
ploughing, and also for food, and sheep were valued for 
their wool, which, " from the earliest records," formed an 
article of export to Flanders, 3 and was afterwards much 
more largely produced. Large numbers of swine were 
kept, 4 since the rearing and maintenance of these was far 
more economical than that of cattle, as they could feed on 

1 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 78. 

2 So much so that rent was often paid by a stipulated quantity of eels. 
Social England, Vol. I. p. 207. 

3 Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 78, and see also Macpherson, i. 288. 
4 P. H. Newman in Social England, Vol. I. p. 213, and see the illumina- 
tion in the Cottonian MSS. 



40 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

the acorns and beech-mast found in unlimited quantities in 
the forests. " Pannage," or food for swine, is frequently 
mentioned in Domesday, being given as for over thirty 
thousand hogs in Hertfordshire and over ninety thousand 
in Essex. Beekeeping was an important industry, the 
honey being used both for mead and flavouring. 1 

§ 21. Methods of Cultivation. 

As regards agriculture, it is noticeable that at one time 
extensive culture was common, 2 as at Lauder, 3 but it 
gradually was given up in favour of the intensive system. 
Special fields were set apart for cultivation in common 
as permanent arable land on the open field system, and 
numerous survivals thereof are found in England even to 
the present day, as at Laxton in Notts, in Cambridgeshire, 
and elsewhere. 4 Both the two-field and the three-field 
system were employed, one field lying fallow and the other 
being under crop according to the former method, while, 
under the latter, two out of three fields were under crops 
and the third lay fallow. 5 Though the two-field system, 
or a modified form of it, 6 was not uncommon, the three- 
field one became eventually more usual. The crops grown 
included wheat, rye, oats, and barley, with beans and 
pease. The fields were not enclosed, except by temporary 
fences, which were removed after harvest so that the cattle 
might feed, and strips of land belonging to various owners 
and tenants lay intermingled 7 with those occupied by the 
others, being only marked off by " balks " of untilled land. 
A villein generally possessed a pair of oxen along with his 
holding, but probably the various small tenants combined 
their teams in order to do their ploughing more effectively, 8 
the normal team being, as we saw, of eight oxen. 9 Most 
of the operations of agriculture were performed in common, 

1 York Powell, Soc. Eng., Vol. I. p. 124 ; for swine, cf. ib., p. 213. 

2 Cunningham, i. p. 20. 3 So Cunningham, butc/. Gomme, V. C, p. 150. 

4 Seebohm, Village Community, 1-13. 

5 See the diagram and explanation in Cunningham, i. 71. 

6 At least in Germany, cf. Hanssen, Agrarhist. Abh., i. 178. In some 
districts of England also both systems existed side by side. 

7 Laws oflne, 42 (Thorpe, i. 129). 8 Cunningham, i. 73. 
9 Seebohm, V. G., p. 388. 



THE SAXON PERIOD 41 

or by men whom the village community as a whole paid, 
or rather supported, and who did certain work, such as 
thatching, swine-herding, or ploughing, in return for their 
keep. 1 This common system of agriculture naturally pro- 
duced only poor results, and prevented improvement by 
individual enterprise, but it sufficed for the simple re- 
quirements of those days, and was in harmony with the 
economic ideas of the age. 

§ 22. Isolation of Villages. Crafts and Trades. 
Each of the separate communities living in these villages, 
or in the small towns that were now growing up, 2 was on 
the whole very much cut off from its neighbours. Partly 
because of the disuuion and conflicts that for many years 
prevailed among the various Saxon conquerors, and partly 
owing to the difficulties of intercommunication when the 
Roman roads were no longer kept up, and from many other 
causes, the villages were very much disinclined for mutual 
; intercourse, and endeavoured to be, as far as possible, each 
a self-sufficing economic unit, obtaining their food and 
clothing, coarse and rough though it generally was, from 
their own flocks and herds and from their own land. 
Hence only the simplest arts and domestic manufactures 
were carried on by the people at large, such as the crafts of 
the iron and coppersmith, the shoemaker, and the carpenter. 
It is, however, proper to notice the important part which 
the monasteries played as centres of industrial life. The 
larger monasteries, such as those of St Edmunds or 
Glastonbury, were great industrial centres, 3 and it was the 
monks, or the foreign workmen introduced by them, who 
brought to a high degree of perfection the arts of 
embroidery and weaving, and of glass and metal work for 
ornamental purposes.* St. Dunstan, 5 among others, is said 
to have encouraged metal work. But the great mass of 
the people cared little for such arts. 

1 Cunningham quotes instances from Saxon and Welsh sources on p. 74 
of vol i. , Growth of English Industry. 

2 On the growth of towns, see later, p. 86 et seq. 

3 A. L. Smith in Social England, Vol. I. p. 207. 

4 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. 78. 

5 Will, of Malm., Vita S. Dunstani, ch. ix. p. 262 ; Stubbs' Memorials of 
St Dunstan (ed. 1874). 



42 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

But however strongly a community may desire — or feel 
it necessary — to be self-sufficing, it can never be so entirely. 
Differences of soil, of mineral wealth, and of other advantages 
cause one community to lack that which another has in 
abundance. Salt, for instance, was very largely in request 
(as we have seen) for salting meat for winter use, and some 
idea of the importance of the salt manufacture of that 
period may be obtained from the fact that in six shires no 
less than 727 salt works are named in Domesday as paying 
rent to their lords. But it cannot be universally procured 
in England, any more than iron and other necessaries of life. 
Hence internal trade, however limited, was still sure to 
arise, and we find evidence of its recognised existence in 
the laws of Ine, 1 which require that " chapmen " should 
trade before witnesses. This proves the existence of a dis- 
tinct class of traders, and it is also certain that local markets 
likewise existed. At first these were always held on the 
neutral boundaries between the territories of two or more 
villages or communities, 2 the place of the market being 
marked by a boundary stone, the origin of the later 
"market cross." Sunday seems to have been the usual 
market day, till the influence of the church altered it to 
Saturday. 3 Sometimes also, besides these local markets, 
larger ones were held at stated times during the year in well- 
known localities, and the shrines of saints were among the 
most frequented spots for this purpose. These fixed 
markets often developed into towns. Thus the origin of 
Glasgow may be traced to the fair held at the shrine of St 
Ninian (570 A.D.), 4 and many other instances of the 
religious origin, not only of fairs but also of towns 
themselves, might thus be quoted. These markets were 
productive of great revenue to the lord of the manor in 
which they were held ; that at Taunton 5 brought in 

1 Laws of Ine, 25 ; Thorpe, i. 118. 

2 A good example of this is Moreton-in-Marsh, an ancient market town 
situated on the boundaries of the four counties of Oxford, Gloucester, 
Worcester, and Warwick. The fact is recorded by a stone, known as the 
"four shires' stone," and situated about a mile from the present town 
along the London road. 

3 Craik, British Commerce, i. 74. 4 Cunningham, i. 90. 

5 For Taunton market dues, cf. Thorpe, Dip. Aug., 235; and Social 
England, i. 208. 



THE SAXON PERIOD 43 

£2, 10s. a year in fees, and that at Bedford £7, and we 
shall have occasion to mention them as factors in the 
growth of towns in another chapter (pp. 87, 89). 

It seems that in the early days of the Saxon settlement, 
trade at the markets and fairs was largely carried on by 
simple bartering of commodities. Mere barter, however, is 
tedious and cumbersome ; and although up to a late period 
of the Saxon settlement a large proportion, though not the 
whole, of English trade proceeded in this fashion, 1 the use 
of coined money for the purposes of exchange became 
common in the ninth century, while in 900 A.D. 
regular money payments are recorded as being made by 
tenants to their landlords. 2 And when we come to the levy 
of Danegeld (991 A.D.), it is clear from the very imposition 
of such a tax that metallic money must have been widely 
diffused and in general circulation. 

§ 23. Foreign Commerce and the Danes. 

Trade of all kinds had suffered a severe blow when the 
Romans quitted Britain, but even during the Saxon period 
English merchants still carried on a certain, though limited, 
amount of foreign commerce. This commerce was greatly 
stimulated by the Danish invasions and settlements. It is 
a curious fact that so many of the names of towns and 
places on our coast have Scandinavian forms, as e.g., those 
terminating in -ness, -vick, and -by, and it is said to 
show that our maritime trade, not only in the Danish dis- 
tricts, but even outside them, was mainly in the hands of 
northern traders. 3 But this is not surprising when we 
remember that the Danes, before ever they came to 
England, were most enterprising navigators, as is shown by 
their very early commerce with Russia and the East, 4 their 
colonisation of Iceland (874 A.D.), and their discoveries of 
Greenland (985 A.D.) and the east coast of North. America. 5 

1 Of. Craik, Hist. Brit. Commerce, i. 83, 84. Slaves and cattle were used 
as media of exchange. 2 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. 112. 

3 The point is noted by A. L. Smith in Social England, i. p. 201. 

4 Cunningham, i. 84. 

5 CJV fully Mallet's Northern Antiquities, ch. ix., and the supplementary 
chapter in Bonn's edition, p. 244. 



44 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

Though they were cruel and savage pirates, they were 
traders also, and, when they had settled down, as they did in 
such large numbers in the North and East of England, 1 they 
formed an active industrial and mercantile population, and 
often became merchants of great importance. To the Danes 
also we may trace the beginnings of some of our towns, 2 since 
their merchants required fixed centres for their commerce. 
" The Danes and Northmen," says Professor Cunningham, 3 
" were the leading merchants, and hence it was under Danish 
and Norse influences that the villages [which afterwards 
became towns] were planted at centres suitable for com- 
merce, or that well-placed villages received a new develop- 
ment." Besides this they were instrumental in causing 
English trade to develope with the North of Europe, and, 
generally speaking, gave a needed stimulus to navigation, 
which the Saxons for some unaccountable reason neglected 
as soon as they settled down in England. A sign of their 
influence is seen in the " doom " or decree, probably of the 
tenth century, which provided that " if a merchant thrived 
so that he fared thrice over the sea by his own means, then 
was he of thegen-right worthy " 4 — and this thegen-right gave 
him a comparatively high rank. The settlement of German 

1 Their presence is still so clearly perceptible in the place-names, pro- 
vincial words, and the physique of the population of these districts, that 
we need not further enlarge upon the abiding nature of their influence. 
It will be sufficient to note briefly the extent of the ' ' Danelagh " (as 
given by F. York Powell, Soc. Eng., i. p. 145). 

Middlesex and Essex, Saxon land chiefly settled by Danes. 
Norfolk and Suffolk, East English land do. do. 

Bucks, Northants, \ Land of the English of the March, 
Herts, Beds, > settled chiefly by Danes, but also by 

Cambs, Hunts, ) Northmen. 

t^ , ' J at ii ' I Land of the English of the March, settled 
Derby, Notts, L ,.„ , „ , 6 

Stamford district, \ chiefly by Northmen. 

Yorks and part of Durham, North English 
Northmen. 

2 The five Danish boroughs of Derby, Nottingh^ ^Leicester, 
and Stamford had a most complete municipal constiti 

3 English Industry and Commerce, i. 88. 
* Banks, 6; Thorpe, i. 193. It was probably pass^R, in Athelstan's 

reign, Craik, i. 66. 




THE SAXON PERIOD 45 

merchants in London, 1 pointing to an increasing continental 
traffic, also dates from the time of Ethelred the Unready 
(about 1000 A.D.). 

Much of this foreign trade, such as it was, and it certainly 
was not very great, lay in the quantities of precious metals 
and stuff for embroideries which were imported for use in 
the monasteries (p. 41). A good list of such imports is 
given by the merchant who is supposed to speak in iElfric's 
Saxon Dialogues. 2 He mentions purple, silk, gems, ivory, 
gold, dyed stuffs, dyes, wine, oil, brass, tin, glass, and 
sulphur ; while the dangers of the foreign traders calling 
are pithily expressed in his remark, that " sometimes I 
suffer shipwreck with the loss of all my goods, scarcely 
escaping myself." Besides the imports mentioned here we 
may add furs and skins (which came gradually to be im- 
ported instead of exported, as wild animals died out in 
England), weapons of war, and iron -work. The exports 
which were exchanged for these were chiefly raw products, 
including wool — which afterwards became more and more 
important — cattle, and horses, 3 with tin, lead, and possibly 
iron. There was a very large export trade in slaves, and 
their prices are recorded in the laws of the period. 4 Bristol 
was a great centre of this sad traffic, 5 and remained so till 
the twelfth century, and English and Danish slaves formed 
an important merchandise in the markets of Germany. 
The devout Gytha, Earl Godwin's wife, is said to have 
shipped whole gangs, especially of young and pretty women, 
for sale in Denmark. 6 As in many modern instances, her 
piety was not allowed to prejudice her pocket. As regards 
the travels of English merchants, we know that they went 
as far as Marseilles, and frequented the great French fairs 
of Rouen and St Denis 7 in the ninth century ; while, 
rather earlier, we have a most interesting document, our 

1 Craik, His^^a CotMi., i. 68. 

2 See Thorpe, H» Anglo -Sax onica, p. 101. 

3 These^B mm in a law of Athelstan, Craik, i. 71. 

4 Leges "VaZlMHp. xvii. 30, 31, and II. xxii. 13. The price was one 
pound of silver j^ya pound and a half "if brought from across the sea." 

5 William of MSlmesbury, Vita Wlfstani, ii. 20, and Craik, i. 71. 

6 Pearson, Hist, of Eng., i, 287, 7 Cunningham, i. 80. 



46 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

first treaty of commerce in fact, 1 dated 796 A.D., by which 
Karl the Great, or Charlemagne, as he is sometimes called, 
grants protection to certain English traders from Mercia. 
In King Alfred's days, one English bishop is said to have 
" penetrated prosperously" as far as India, 2 bearing the 
King's gifts to the shrine of St Thomas, on the Malabar 
coast, but this is an isolated case, and though Alfred tried 
to encourage navigation by his care for the navy, 3 and by 
his interest in the adventurous voyages of Oth ere and 
Wulfstan, 4 the fact remains that foreign merchants, includ- 
ing Jews, 5 came to England in greater numbers than the 
English ventured abroad. 

§ 24. Summary of Trade and Industry in the Saxon 

Period. 

Taking a general survey of the period between the Saxon 
and the Norman conquests, we see that crafts and manu- 
factures were few and simple, being limited as far as possible 
to separate and isolated communities. The fine arts, and 
works in metal and embroideries, were confined to the 
monasteries, which also imported them. The immense 
mineral wealth of the island in iron and coal was practically 
untouched. Trade, both internal and foreign, was small, 
though it developed as the country became more peaceful 
and united. The great mass of the population was engaged 
in agriculture, and every man had, so to speak, a stake in 
the land and belonged to a manor or an overlord. A landless 
man was altogether outside the pale of social life. Land, 
in fact, was the basis of everything, 6 and it is for this reason 
that it is so important to understand the conditions of 
tenure and the whole land system of that age. Hence we 
must occupy a short time in the discussion of the origin of 
the manorial system, which at the close of the Saxon period 
we find in force throughout the country. 

1 Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, iii. 496. 

2 So William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontif. , ii. 80. 

3 Cf. Craik, Hist. Brit. Commerce, i. 65. 4 In his Orosius. 

5 Craik, British Commerce, i. 63, 64. 

6 8tubbs ; Const. Hist., I, ch. v. pp. 74, 79, 






CHAPTER IV 

THE MANOR AND THE MANORIAL SYSTEM 

§ 25. The Interest of the Question as to the Origin of the 

Manor. 

The question of the origin of the English manor, however 
abstract and academic it may at first appear, is in reality 
one of the most interesting of all social topics. When the 
manor is clearly distinguished as a social factor in the 
historical period, it always involves two elements — the 
seigneurial and the communal, the lord on the one hand, and 
on the other his dependants, who do their work and hold 
their land in common. The question, therefore, at once 
arises as to which of these two elements is the older ? Is 
the manor the result of the subjection of an originally free 
community to an overlord, or was there always, even in the 
beginnings of social life, a dependent and servile population 
who tilled the land for the benefit of others 1 According 
as history decides one way or the other, it will influence 
our views on the land question in general, including the 
discussions even of the present day. From one point of 
view we shall be inclined to think that the present system 
of private property in land is the system which, in one 
form or another, has existed from the beginning, and is the 
outcome of social forces which have their justification in 
the earliest pages of history. From another point of view 
we may hold that property in land did not exist at all in 
early times, but that the land was held in common for the 
good of all, while the ownership of it was vested only in 
the nation, so that the present system of private owner- 
ship is the degenerate outcome of centuries of appropriation 
of common property by individuals, whose title to it was in 
many cases more or less doubtful. Hence reformers like 
Henry George maintain that we ought to revert to common 
ownership of land as being the only natural condition and 

47 



48 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

basis of social and economic life, though, on the other hand, 
so great an authority as Sir Henry Maine has declared that 
the change from common to private ownership is the sign 
of an advancing civilisation. Whatever view we hold, it is 
obvious that the question of the origin of the manor and 
of property in land is of more than usual interest. 

§ 26. The Mark Theory and the Manor. 
During the present century, owing to the valuable labours 
of a number of German and English historians, 1 some writers 
have come to the conclusion (though it is much disputed) 
that in very early times, before the Germanic tribes, after- 
wards called English, had crossed over to England, or per- 
haps even before they had settled down in Europe, all land 
was held in common by various communities. Each com- 
munity contained a few families, or possibly a whole tribe. 
Thq land occupied by this community had been cleared 
away from the original forests or wastes where they had 
settled, 2 and was separated from that of other communities 
by a boundary or mark, a name which in course of time 
came to be applied not to the boundary but to the land 
itself thus portioned off. 2 Within this mark was the 
primitive village or township, where each member of the 
community had his house, and where each had a common 
share in the land. This land was of three kinds: — (1) 
The forest and waste land, from which the mark had been 
originally cleared, useful for rough natural pasture, but 
quite uncultivated ; (2) The "pasture land, including, per- 
haps, meadows? sometimes enclosed and sometimes open, in 
which each mark-man looked after his own hay, and stacked 
it for the winter. This land was sometimes divided into allot- 
ments for each member ; (3) The arable land, which also 
was divided into allotments for each mark-man. But a mans 
rights, whether in the allotments or in the common pastures 
and forests, were of the nature of usufruct only, his title to 
absolute ownership being merged in the general title of the 

1 Including Kemble, K. Maurer, Stubbs, Freeman, Gneist, Maine, and 
especially G. F. von Maurer and Hanssen. For a careful summary of the 
views of each see Vinogradoff's able Introduction in his Villeinage in England. 

2 Stubbs, Const. Hist., i. p. 49, ch. iii., who gives a good summary of 
the mark system, s Stubbs, Const. Hist., i. 49, 



THE MANOR AND MANORIAL SYSTEM 49 

tribe, which, however, he of course shared with the rest. 1 
To settle any question relating to the division or use of the 
land, such as the choice of the meadow, the rotation of 
crops, or the allotment of the shares of land, or to decide 
any other business of common importance, the members of 
the mark, or mark-men, met in a common council called 
the mark-moot 2 — an institution of which relics are said to 
have survived for many centuries. 3 This council, and the 
mark generally, formed, it was said, the political, social, 
and economic unit of the early English tribes, but now this 
view is not supported by scholars, except as regards agri- 
cultural arrangements. The mark probably did not exist 
in the form just sketched out when these tribes first occupied 
England, though there may have been some modification of 
it introduced. It had probably already undergone consider- 
able transformation towards what is called the manorial 
system and private ownership. 4 But those who hold the 
mark theory maintain that many traces of it still remain 
even now. Our commons, 5 still numerous in spite of 
hundreds of enclosures, the manorial courts, 6 and the names 
of places ending in -ing — a termination which implies a 
family settlement 7 — are evidences which remain among us 
even at the close of the nineteenth century. And, of course, 
it is to the mark system that the communal element in our 
early and mediaeval English agriculture is supposed to be due. 

§ 27. Criticisms of the Mark Theory. 

Leaving for the moment the consideration of the truth or 
inaccuracy of the mark theory, we find, at any rate at the 
time when the Saxon settlement in England had been com- 
pleted, that a very different system prevailed, namely, the 
manorial system. The word " manor " is a Norman word 
for the Saxon " township " or community, 8 and it differs 

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist., i. p. 49. 

2 Stubbs, i. p. 51. The word mearemot (found a.d. 971) was instanced 
by Kemble, but Anglo-Saxon scholars do not think that mark in this con- 
nexion means more than a "boundary." Cf. Earle, Land Charters, p. 45. 

3 Stubbs.. p. 84. 4 76., p. 75. 5 lb., p. 84. 6 lb. 

7 Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. ch. v. p. 81 ; Taylor, Words and Places, 132. 

8 So Ordericus Vitalis, iv. 7 ; see Stubbs, Const. Hist. , I. ch. v. p. S9, 
and ch. ix. p. 273. 

D 



50 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

from the mark in that the mark was a group of house- 
holds or persons organised and governed on a communal 
and democratic basis, while in the manor we find an auto- 
cratic organisation and government, whereby a group of 
tenants (not independent "markmen") acknowledge the 
superior position and authority of a "lord of the manor." 
The great feature of the manor is, in fact, this subjection to 
a lord, who owned absolutely a certain portion of the land 
therein and had rights of rent (paid in services, food, or 
money, or in all three) over the remainder. On the other 
hand the tenants had certain rights as against the lord, 1 
but these and the questions connected with these we must 
leave till later. 

Such are the distinctive features of the mark and the 
manor. The point to be now considered is : how did the 
one result from the other ? It seems very probable that 
the manorial system must have been the result of conquest, 
but if so, who were the conquerors that imposed it upon 
their subjects ? Were they the Anglo-Saxons, or the 
Romans, or the pre-Roman invaders of Britain ? If the 
conquerors were the Saxons, then it follows that they them- 
selves had already developed beyond the mark system before 
they came to these islands. It was at one time thought 
that the manorial system grew up in the later periods 
of the Saxon conquest, but received the form, with which 
mediaeval documents make us familiar, only shortly before 
the Norman rule, and assumed many of its features under 
Norman influence. But it is now more generally accepted 
that the manorial system was in existence as the prevailing 
form of social organisation very soon after the Saxon invasion. 2 

1 Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England, pp. 174, 176. 

2 This is the net result of Mr Seebohm's valuable labours. He thinks 
that the Roman villa presents all the essential features of an English 
manor, and thus implies that the Saxon lords of the manors merely stepped 
into the shoes of their Roman predecessors. In an essay more recent than 
his book on the Village Community, he seems inclined to ante-date the 
feudal side of the manorial system still further. ' ' The British village 
community was already a good deal feudalised " before the Saxon conquest ; 
possibly (under the influence of Belgic Gauls of the S. E. ) even before the 
Roman conquest. See his valuable critique of Vinogradoff in the En g lish 
Historical Review, Vol. VII., No. 27 (July 1892). 



THE MANOR AND MANORIAL SYSTEM 51 

Certainly we have hardly any satisfactory evidence of the 
mark itself in England, though/ as we noted just above, 
survivals of its influence are found. And, indeed, 
many authorities of great weight have gone so far as to 
deny that the mark ever had any existence, whether in 
England or Europe, except in the mistaken theories of 
Teutonic historians. Those who reject the mark theory do 
so largely because they argue that the servile and depen- 
dent cultivators of the manorial system lead us back, not 
to an originally free, but to an originally servile population. 
They deny that the communal element is ever seen where 
it can be proved that the cultivating group are proprietors ; 
it is only found among dependants or tenants, not among 
free men. " Where the cultivating group are in any 
real sense proprietors they have no corporate character, and 
where they have a corporate character they are not pro- 
prietors." 1 They combat, moreover, the very facts and 
quotations from ancient writers upon which advocates of 
the mark theory base their inferences. Apart from the 
powerful work of Mr F. Seebohm in his Village Community, 
perhaps the most concise and certainly the most violent 
attack upon the holders of the mark theory is that made 
by Fustel de Coulanges in his essay on the Origin of 
Property in Land. 2 He first challenges the meaning 
given to certain passages of Caesar and Tacitus 3 by G. F. 
von Maurer, and then tries to show that in early German 
law mark means " a boundary " primarily, and secondly a 
piece of private property, and that private property in land 

1 W. J. Ashley, criticising Maine in Note A to his own Introduction to 
F. de Coulanges' Origin of Property in Land, p. xlvii. 

2 It first appeared in Revue des Questions Historiques, April 1889, and is 
published separately in English in Mr Ashley's translation above referred to. 

3 The main passages are Caesar, B. G., vi. 21-23, and Tacitus, Germ., c. 26, 
upon which e.g. our English authority Stubbs bases his remarks in Const. 
Hist., I. c. ii. But it seems to me that de Coulanges, although he makes 
out a good case against von Maurer on some points, emphasises unduly 
Caesar's words cogunt, compel, and principes, chiefs, in saying they mean 
"chiefs arbitrarily disposing of the soil of which alone they are owners." 
But in their natural sense the words merely imply that the people fall in 
with the arrangements made by their "chief men," and for all we know, 
the people may merely have deputed certain chief men to carry out the 
customary division of land desired by the community. 



52 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

was the assumption upon which all early German law is 
based. But M. de Coulanges' criticisms, valuable as they 
are, do not disprove altogether the existence of some form of 
common ownership of land in the remoter periods of Teutonic 
or of British history ; for the proof of this common owner- 
ship lies more in survivals and customs * than in stray 
references in legal documents. And Professor Lamprecht, 
a follower of von Maurer, was quite right in pointing out 2 
that nothing depends on the word " mark " itself. It 
matters very little after all whether we find the word in 
documents or not ; it even matters very little whether the 
mark ever existed as it is depicted by von Maurer or 
Stubbs. The fact remains that there are extensive 
evidences of communal ownership (as well as tenancy) 
in English manors, and these evidences point back to a 
state of things which the theory of private property in land 
and a dependent body of cultivators in the earliest times 
cannot satisfactorily explain. 

§ 28. Vinogradoff's Evidence on the Manorial System. 
The most recent, and certainly one of the most learned, 
investigators of this difficult question has concluded, as 
the result of his researches, that " the communal organisa- 
tion of the peasantry is more ancient and more deeply laid 
than the manorial order. Even the feudal period shows 
everywhere traces of a peasant class living and working in 
economically self-dependent communities under the loose 
authority of a lord, whose claims may proceed from 
political sources, and affect the semblance of ownership, 
but do not give rise to the manorial connection between 
estate and village." 3 The so-called manorial system con- 
sists in the peculiar connection of two entirely distinct 
agrarian bodies or parties 4 — the community of villagers 
cultivating their own fields, and the home-estate (some- 
times loosely called the demesne) of the lord " tacked on 
to " this settlement. This expression " tacked on " gives 
the key to the solution of the question. The manorial 

1 As shown e.g., in Gomme's Village Community. 

2 In Le Moyen Age, June 1889, p. 131. 

3 Vinogradoff, Villeinage, pp. 408, 409. 4 lb., p. 404. 



THE MANOR AND MANORIAL SYSTEM 53 

system, as we find in late Saxon and Norman times, 
contains a seigneurial element which has evidently been 
superimposed upon an originally communal element. 
Originally there was an independent village community 
(whether living exactly according to the " mark " system 
or not does riot matter), but in later times we find a 
dependent community working for a home-farm, which is 
the lord's. How did the independent community become 
subject to this lord ? The holders of the older " mark " 
theory seem to have supposed that the subjection was 
due to political and social causes gradually enhancing the 
power of some local man of note or authority. "The 
relation of dependence on a lord may have been entered 
into by a free landowner for the sake of honour or pro- 
tection " ; * and there are abundant evidences of this 
" commendation " of weaker men to those who were 
politically and socially more powerful 2 — though, as a matter 
of fact, the practice was generally the result of the police 
organisation, not of the land system. 3 " The man who had 
land judged the man who had not," 4 and there was a 
constant assimilation going on between the really servile 
dependents of a lord and the smaller landowners. But 
however the practice of commendation arose, it undoubtedly 
had great effect in reducing the originally free status of 
many of the smaller landowners. At the same time, the 
main features of the manorial subjection to a lord are 
probably due more to the influence of conquest than to 
that of social or judicial requirements, though these latter 
cannot be neglected or minimised. The number of servile 
dependents is too large to be accounted for by peaceful 
influences. Moreover, it has been till recently overlooked 
that in many cases the services rendered by dependants 
were rendered not to a lord living on a home farm, but to 
one living at some considerable distance. 5 This is specially 

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist. , vol. I. ch. v. p. 79 ; cf. also p. 273. 

2 Especially in Domesday ; see Ellis, Introd. to Domesday, i. 64-66. 

3 Stubbs, ut ante, p. 79, note, and p. 189. 

4 lb., p. 189. The landless man was compelled to choose a lord for his 
surety and protector, ib., p. 153. 
5 Vinogradoff, Villeinage, p. 405, 



54 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

the case in the furnishing of provisions for the lord's table 
and other wants, for we constantly find that provisions were 
sent by the dependents to a castle a long way off. /There 
is also the matter of the firma unius noctisf as it is 
called, the payment of "provisions for one night" made to 
the king's household by a borough or village, which seems 
to point to a community " standing entirely by itself and 
taxed to a certain tribute, without any superior land-estate 
necessarily engrafted upon it." VinogradofT thinks this 
implies an over-lordship exacting tribute, but not the close 
manorial relationships which we see under a later system. 
Again, the fact that the lord's demesne land is often found 
in strips, mixed up with the strips of the peasantry (p. 82), 
seems also to imply a time when the tenants or subject 
class did not collect to work for the lord upon a separate 
home farm, as we find them doing later, but merely 
devoted one part of their labour upon their own ground in 
the common fields to the use and payment of the lord. 2 
This shows an intermediate stage between the tribute paid 
by a practically self-dependent community (as in the case 
of the firma unius noctis) and the services rendered when 
the village was linked more closely with a manorial estate. 3 
Once again, we note the existence of a special class of 
servants 4 " who collect and supervise the dues and services 
of the peasants " in early times, but who are not to be found 
so frequently in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, 
when the number of " home farms " was becoming greater. 
Besides these special servants (radmen, rodknights or riding- 
bailiffs), we also note that in many cases the " free " tenants 
or socmen (see p. 75) have a kind of supervision over the 
rest while they are doing some of the services for the lord, 
and their position indicates that, though the village is 
already set to work for the lord, it manages this work as 
.much as possible by itself as a self-dependent community. 5 

1 Vinogradoff, Villeinage, p. 405, and see Pearson, Hist, of Eng,, vol. 
I., Appx. D. Thus the community of Badwen in Essex rendered a pay- 
ment of eight nights, Saham and Fordham in Cambs. gave three nights, 
and many other instances are found in Domesday. 

2 Vinogradoff, Villeinage, p. 406. 3 lb., p. 406. 
* 7&.,p. 407. 5 /6.,p. 407. 



THE MANOR AND MANORIAL SYSTEM 55 

§ 29. Evidence from Manorial Courts and Customs. 

All this seems to imply the subjection of originally free 
communities to an overlord, a subjection that proceeded 
first by reducing them to a more or less loose and tribute- 
paying relationship, and later by the introduction of a 
resident lord on a home farm (the demesne), or at least of 
a home farm superintended by a bailiff representing a lord. 
The internal constitution of the manor gives the strongest 
evidence for this original freedom. In the manorial courts 
(p. 80) the tenants were the jurors and suitors, while the 
lord or his steward was not the judge, but merely the 
recorder of their decisions. It was the suitors and jurors, 
the tenants in fact, who constituted the court and pro- 
nounced the judgments. 1 It was not till much later, 
under Norman influence, that the status of the tenants in 
their own courts became debased, and the lord or his 
bailiff was regarded as the judge. 2 

Another very important piece of evidence, showing that 
ceremonies, which have been erroneously regarded as prov- 
ing the original servility of tenants prove in reality their 
original freedom, is the manorial form of surrender and 
admittance. When a tenant was admitted into his holding 
" in base tenure," the steward handed to him a rod. This 
was till lately thought to symbolise the lord's authority, but 
Vinogradoff shows 3 that, on the contrary, it was a survival 
of the old custom, requiring that important transactions 
should be performed before witnesses and a middleman, and 
that the steward had taken the place of the middleman and 
did not really represent the lord at all. 4 A case like this 
shows us at once how archaic are the constitutions and 
customs of the village community, and how easily, when 
these customs are no longer understood, they may be 
erroneously construed as evidences of seigneurial power. 

1 Vinogradoff, Villeinage, p. 370. 

2 It may be added that the village as a body frequently acts as an or- 
ganised community in disposing of rights connected with the soil. Cf. the 
case of Brightwaltham, Vinogradoff, p. 359. 3 Villeinage, pp. 372, 373. 

4 Of. Gomme, Vill. Comm., p. 191, who quotes a similar transference of a 
rod, or twig, in the Malmesbury village community. The twig here (as 
in the other cases mentioned by Vinogradoff) represents the land itself, 
certainly not a lord's authority. 



56 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

§ 30. The " Customary" Tenants. 

The position of " free " tenants (p. 75) in the later manors 
is, again, a matter of some difficulty. It is as erroneous 
to imagine that at (say) the time of Domesday there 
was no intermediate grade between the lord and his serfs 
or villeins, as it is to hold that all the Saxons and those 
who came over with them were entirely free. In Domes- 
day we find traces of a large number of tenants of various 
degrees of freedom, and it is these traces, together with 
those derived from the legal procedure of the Norman 
period, that Vinogradoff has explained with masterly insight. 
It is now pretty evident that the classification of society 
into villeins and freedholders is comparatively late and 
artificial, 1 and that between these two distinct classes there 
was a third class, and a very large one, of " customary " 2 
freeholders, who had originally formed the great mass of 
the peasantry. 3 The Anglo-Saxon world was ordered and 
governed by custom to an extent quite unappreciated by 
the Norman lawyer and surveyor, and hardly to be realised 
at all by Englishmen of the present day. But this " cus- 
tomary " life, and all that it implied, was perfectly well 
understood by the inhabitants of the village who lived 
under it. The villagers cared nothing for abstract legal 
definitions of tenure and status, though they all knew the 
conditions under which they and their forefathers held their 
land. But the Normans, with their fixed ideas of " free " 
and " unfree " tenancies, tried to reduce everyone into one 
of these two sharply-defined categories, 4 and hence it comes 
that " villeinage " must not be taken too literally as a clear 
definition of a tenant's status or tenure, but we must 
remember that it was really " a complex mould into which 
several heterogeneous elements had been fused." 5 Hence 

1 Villeinage, pp. 132, 177. 

2 The word custumarius is found in Rot. Hundred., ii. 422, 507a. 

3 Vinogradoff, p. 220. 

4 The fact that free men in Kent and on the Danish manors of Essex 
were all classed by Domesday as villani shows what mistakes the Normans 
made. Vinogradoff, p. 208. 

5 Vinogradoff, p. 177 ; cf. also "The life of the villein is chiefly dependent on 
custom, which is the great characteristic of medieval relations and which stands 
in sharp contrast with slavery on the one hand and freedom on the other." 



THE MANOR AND MANORIAL SYSTEM 57 

it is certain that many men who in Domesday are classed as 
" villeins " were for all intents and purposes " free " men, 
who either merely rendered services, not always necessarily 
servile, as a condition of holding land, or who, in addition 
to holding perfectly free land, held also some other land 
in villeinage, and thus became confused altogether with 
villeins. There is little doubt that the free holdings in the 
manors represent, in many cases, free shares in a village 
community, upon which the manorial structure has been 
superimposed. 1 

§ 31. The Evidence of Village Communities. 

We have, therefore, many reasons for believing that the 
original condition of the subject manorial villages had been 
at an earlier period that of free communities. But if so, can 
we not find traces of such communities in England ? Were 
they all extinct at the time of Domesday ? Recent writers 
certainly incline to the belief that individually and collec- 
tively villeins were more free in Saxon than in Norman 
times, 2 but it has been stoutly denied 3 that there are any 
free village communities to be found later than the Norman 
conquest, or, indeed, previous to it. Only communities 
peopled by villeins are mentioned. But we have already 
seen that Domesday is an unsatisfactory guide in questions 
of status, 4 and there is good reason to doubt whether these 
villein communities were quite so devoid of freedom as 
the Norman surveyors described them. In the cases of 
Chippenham and Malmesbury, at least, Mr Gomme 5 gives 
very remarkable evidence of their being free communities 
in the time of Domesday, and much later also, and the 
various other instances which he quotes in his valuable 
work 6 certainly tend to prove very clearly, by their relics 

1 Vinogradoff, p. 353. Cf. Bracton, De Leg., ch. xi. /. 7 (i. p. 53, ed. 
Twiss). Of course there were also other causes of free tenements, as — 
e.g., commutation, but this is one cause which cannot be overlooked. 

2 Vinogradoff, p. 135. 

3 Seebohm, Village Comm., p. 103; Ashley, Econ. Hist., i. 18, and in 
his introd. to F. de Coulanges. 4 Vinogradoff, p. 208. 

5 Village Comm., pp. 173-200, and see p. 195 specially for the quotation 
from Domesday. 

6 See especially ch, vi, on "Tribal Communities in Britain," ch. vii. 



58 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

and survivals, that, as VinogradofT also concludes, the free 
village community existed in these islands, as it did else- 
where, before the manorial system was superimposed or 
" tacked on to " it. 

§ 32. A Survey of the Origin of the Manor. 

Having come to this conclusion, which must necessarily 
influence any view which we take of the manorial system, 
we may now venture to set forth a comprehensive though 
brief survey of the origin of the village community, with 
its seigneurial and communal elements, which we find in 
historic times. This I do with considerable diffidence — for 
I am well aware of the conflicting theories already pro- 
pounded — but a review of the facts, placed in due per- 
spective and exhibiting an orderly development, may have 
its advantages. To begin with, we see, on looking back 
into the mists of prehistoric antiquity, that a large J non- 
Aryan population existed in these islands in the Neolithic 
stage of culture. They had already made some small 
advances in agriculture, and had passed, 2 or were rapidly 
passing, from the tribal 3 to the village community — a 
transition 4 which is natural as the development of agri- 
culture necessitates a closer connection with the soil than 
the more or less unsettled tribal stage allows. Upon the 
state of society thus formed, or forming, descended succes- 
sive waves of Aryan invaders in the shape of the Celtic 
immigrants to Britain. At first, no doubt, the Aryan 
tribes, with the pride so characteristic of the earlier Aryan 
races, took but little part in the cultivation of the land, 
but preferred to leave it to the conquered and subject 
Iberians, exercising only a loose overlordship over the more 
remote village communities. 5 (This accounts for the sur- 
vival, centuries later, of the customs already mentioned, that 

Transitional types of the village community in Britain, ch. viii. The Final 
type ; also ch. iii. Methods of dealing with British evidence. 

1 Boyd Dawkins, Early Man, pp. 290, 306. 2 Elton, Origins, p. 145. 

3 Boyd Dawkins, Early Man, p. 272. 

4 Cf. the similar transition from tribe to village in India ; Tupper, 
Punjab Customary Law, ii. p. 28. The tribal community persisted longer 
in Wales ; cf. Gomme, V. G. , p. 63, 

5 Gomme, V. C, p. 71. 



THE MANOR AND MANORIAL SYSTEM 59 

suggest, even in the later manors, a much looser tie between 
lord and dependants than afterwards existed.) But as 
time went on we know that the Celtic invaders, especially 
the most recent of them (p. 13), themselves made very 
considerable progress in agriculture, and thus the agrarian 
bond between the subject and the conquering races became 
closer and closer. Then came the Roman occupation, but 
we have already seen that, after making full allowance for 
the undoubted extent of Roman influence in other direc- 
tions, its effect upon the village community and its agricul- 
ture can only have been on a level with our own influence 
upon the villages of India. When the Romans took away 
their military and administrative forces, the Celtic and non- 
Aryan communities remained much as they had been before 
the Romans came. 1 The Roman did not enter into the 
life of the village community as did Celt or Saxon. He 
was above it and not of it. But when the Saxons came, 
their influence was felt at once. Terrible as they were in 
their destruction of the upper classes, especially those of 
the towns, they did not seek to destroy the peasantry of 
the rural districts, 2 any more than the successive conquerors 
of India (who could be to the full as cruel as the Saxons 
ever were) have obliterated the villagers of the Punjab. 3 
On the contrary, their own agrarian development (p. 39) 
was much the same as that of the land they invaded. The 
village community received, therefore, certainly no check 
from this fresh invasion. What happened was that the 
Celt and Iberian were debased in status in some cases, 
where the conquerors made their first settlements, but were 
left in the remoter parts of the country pretty much as 
before, though with a continual tendency to fresh debase- 
ment as time went on and the conquest proceeded. They 
helped to form the large and mixed class of servile de- 
pendants whom we find later. The Saxons themselves 
brought slaves and dependants with them, for it is absurd 
to suppose them all free and equal. 4 And no doubt the 

1 Cf. Gomme, V. C, pp. 60, 63. 2 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. xxxviii. 

3 Lord Metcalfe, quoted by Gomme, V. C. , p. 60. 

4 There were almost certainly larger and smaller private estates ; Stubbs, 
Const. Hist., vol. I. ch. v. pp. 52, 73. For slaves, cf. p. 78. 



60 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

leaders and their chief followers occupied from the first 
period of the invasion a high position in the social and 
economic scale. 1 But there were also large numbers of 
free Saxon soldiers 2 who settled down on the land which 
they and their chiefs had taken, and it is to this class — 
and to the Danes who came later — that we owe the 
numerous " free tenants " of the later manor. It is pretty 
evident also that the amount of freedom was greater in' 
Saxon times than in Norman, 3 and consequently greater in 
the earlier portion of the Saxon period than in the later. 
Much also was left to custom and tradition in the relations 
of lord and dependant. Then finally came the Norman 
conquest, with its stricter feudalism, its inelastic ideas of 
status and tenure, and its great work of firm organisation 
and consolidation. The tie between the lord and his 
dependants had been growing closer, more personal, and, if 
we may say so, more "residentiary," all through the Saxon 
period, and the Norman conquest accentuated this develop- 
ment, raising the lord, debasing the dependant, and fusing 
into one the numerous varying grades of villeinage. And 
so we arrive at last at the manor of historic times, with all 
those various influences and survivals within it that were 
the heritage of Iberian, Celt, and Saxon, but which history 
could not record. 

§ 33. The Feudal System. 

In the next period we shall find this manorial system 
consolidated and organised under the Norman rule, and 
may therefore defer a detailed description of a typical 
manor till then. Here we may add, however, that the 
manor, especially in its social, judicial, political, and non- 
economic relations, is closely connected with the feudal 
system. But it must be remembered that feudalism, and 
all that it implied, had already begun in England some 
considerable time before the Norman conquest ; and as the 
manor afforded a convenient unit, political as well as social, 

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist., Vol. I. pp. 73, 55, 149. 

2 The division of the land among the conquering host is seen in Stubbs, 
Ut ante, pp. 71, 72. 3 Vinogradoff, Villeinaqe, p. 135. 






THE MANOR AND MANORIAL SYSTEM 61 

for the estimation of feudal duties and services, the lord 
of the manor tended to become more and more a feudal 
chief. In the primitive Saxon constitution the political 
unit had been the free man, but later, as land passed 
from being public to private property, the *gn of freedom 
became the possession of land. The landless man had to 
select a lord, and the " land becomes the sacramental tie of 
.all public relations." 1 The lords of the manors became 
nominally the protectors, but really the masters, of the free- 
men around them, who were poor, and only had a small 
piece of land. The practice of commendation 2 for judicial 
or defensive purposes, and the granting of judicial powers 3 
to the larger landowners, all tended in the same direction, 
while the frequent incursions of the Danes probably threw 
the smaller free tenants still more under the influence of 
the greater local landowners, who would offer them their 
protection in return for manorial services. When, there- 
fore, William the Norman conquered England, he did not, 
as is still often supposed, impose a feudal system upon the 
people. The system was there already, developed from the 
manors, and the Norman kings only organised and crystallised 
it still further. 4 

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. ch. vii. p. 167. 
» -' Stubbs, i. 79, and the valuable note there relating to the practice in 
Domesday. 

3 E.g., sac and soc (Stubbs, i. 184). 

4 Of. Pearson, Hist. ofEng., i. 283, 284. 



PERIOD II 

FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST TO THE REIGN 
OF HENRY III. 

(1066-1216 a.d.) 



PHYSICAL ASPECT 

ENGLAND 

SAXON & NORMAN TIMES . 

OnZy the- 10 Chief Towns ar&in6e>rh 

Lowlands 

JJiZls 

J^oresls 

Marshes 

JSTORsTH 
SEA. 




Scale of English Miles 

IP SO SO -4Q 5Q IS 



Note. — For the features here noted compare the remarks on pages 17, 69 and 107 



CHAPTER V 

DOMESDAY BOOK AND THE MANORS 

§ 34. The Survey ordered by William I. 

It was very natural that when William the Norman had 
conquered England he should wish to ascertain the capa- 
bilities of his kingdom, both in regard to military defence 
and for purposes of taxation, and that he should endeavour 
to gain a comprehensive idea of the results of his conquest. 
He therefore ordered a grand survey of the kingdom to be 
made, and sent commissioners into each district to make it. 
These officials were bidden to make a long list of enquiries 
about all the estates in the realm, including the following 
points : — The name of each manor ; who held it in the 
time of King Edward the Confessor ; how many " hides " 
there were in the manor, 1 or, in other words, the rateable 
value of the estate ; how many ploughs there were on the 
estate, whether belonging to the lord or the villeins ; how 
many villeins, homagers, cottars, or slaves there were ; how 
many free tenants and tenants in socage (socmen) ; how 
much wood, meadow, and pasture ; and the number of 
mills and fish ponds. They were further to enquire what 
had been added to or taken away from the estate — that is, 
the depreciations and improvements ; the gross value in the 
time of King Edward (T.R.E.), the present value in the 
time of King William (T.R.W.) ; how much each free man 
or socman had, and whether any advance could be made in 
the value. The results of this great survey, taken separately 
in counties, were then sent to Winchester, then the capital 
city, and there methodised, enrolled, and codified as we now 

1 It is almost impossible to fix the value of the hide as a measurement. 
It was never expressly determined, nor is it so fixed in Domesday ; Ellis, 
Introd., i. 145 sqq. ; Birch, Domesday, 229. Cunningham (i. 120) puts it 
at 60 to 80 modern acres under crop, or an area of 120, including land 
fallow, under the then system of agriculture. 

E 6s 



66 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

see them. 1 The inquisition was probably commenced in the 
year 1085, and completed in the year following. It con- 
tains the earliest and most reliable statistics for English in- 
dustrial history, and it is to be regretted that no adequate 
general table or analysis of this great work has yet been 
made by a competent economic authority, or that historians 
do not use it more copiously for gaining a knowledge of the 
social and economic conditions of the time. For this latter 
purpose it is absolutely unrivalled. 

§ 35. The Population given by Domesday. 

Before presenting a few main features gathered from the 
large mass of facts thus recorded, it may be well to remark 
that of the 40 counties into which England is now divided, 
six are not included in the survey. Those omitted are 
Monmouth, Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmoreland, 
Durham, and Lancashire. But of these Lancashire had not 
yet been made a separate county, and part of it therefore 
appears in the survey of Yorkshire and Cheshire. Mon- 
mouth was at that time entirely Welsh, and the other 
counties — those in the North — were still desolate and wasted 
by the ruthless severity of William's well-known devastation 
(1069-70 A.D.). After his march from the Humber to the 
Tyne, not one inhabited village was to be seen on the 
road between York and Durham, and many of those whom 
the sword had spared died of starvation in the nine years' 
famine which followed this dreadful punishment. 2 The 
more westerly parts of the North were hardly yet con- 
quered at the time of the survey. The statistics of the 
other 34 counties are, however, pretty full ; and from 
them we gather that the total population must have been, 
in round numbers, rather under two million persons. The 
population actually given 3 is 283,242, but this only 
includes the able-bodied men, and it should be multiplied 
by five to give the general total of actual inhabitants. 
This multiplication gives about 1,400,000, and allowing 

1 Birch, Domesday, p. 25 ; Ellis, i. 153. 

2 Pearson, Hist. of Evg., i. 361, and Freeman, Norman Conquest, iv. 292, 
v. 42. 

3 See Ellis, Introduction to Domesday, Vol. II. p. 514. 



DOMESDAY BOOK AND THE MANORS 67 

for omissions or careless enumeration (as e.g. in York- 
shire 1 ), we may say not much more than 1,800,000 for the 
whole land. Small as this number may seem, it was not 
doubled till the reign of Charles II. 2 

The population of the different counties is interesting, 
and is exhibited in the following tables, first in order of 
actual numbers, and secondly in order of density propor- 
tionate to the area of each county. It will be noticed at 
once that the eastern and southern counties were the most 
populous at that time, as was to be expected in a period 
when the number of the population depended, much more 
closely than it does now, upon the yield of agricultural 
produce and the development of agriculture generally. 



I. Table of Actual Population in Different Counties, 
as given in Domesday. 



County. 


Popula- 
tion."* 1 


County. 


Popula- 
tion. * 


1 Norfolk - 


27,087 


18 Berks 


6,324 


2 Lincoln 


25,305 


19 Notts 


5,686 


3 Suffolk - 


20,491 


20 Cornwall - 


5,438 


4 Devon 


17,434 


21 Bucks 


5,420 


5 Essex 


16,060 


22 Hereford - 


5,368 


6 Somerset - 


13,764 


23 Cambridge 


5,204 


7 Kent 


12,205 


24 Shropshire 


5,080 


8 Sussex 


10,410 


25 Herts 


4,927 


9 Wilts 


10,150 


26 Worcester - 


4,625 


10 Hampshire 


9,032 


27 Surrey 


4,383 


1 1 North Hants - 


8,441 


28 Bedford - 


3,875 


12 Gloucester 


8,366 


29 Staffordshire 


3,178 


13Yorks 


8,055 


30 Derbyshire 


3,041 


14 Dorset 


7,807 


31 Huntingdonshire 


2,914 


15 Oxford - 


6,775 


32 Cheshire - 


2,349 


16 Leicestershire 


6,772 


33 Middlesex - 


2,302 


17 Warwick - 


6,574 


34 Rutland - 


862 



It must be remembered the figures represent only able-bodied males. 



1 See Domesday, f. 302 A, about the manors "ad Prestune" — " sixteen 
Are cultivated by a few men, but how many men there are is not known. ' 

2 Pearson, Hist, of England, i. 377. 



68 



INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 



II. Table of Counties according to Proportionate Density 
of Population. 



County. 


Acres per 


County. 


Acres per 




person.* 




person.* 


1 Suffolk - 


46 


18 Warwick - 


87 


2 Norfolk - 


50 


19 Sussex 


89 


3 Essex 


61 


20 Notts 


92 


4 Middlesex - 


66 


21 Gloucester 


93 


5 Lincoln 


69 


22 Devon 


94 


6 Oxfordshire 


71 


23 Hereford - 


99 


7 Northamps 


74 


24 Cambs 


100 


8 Leicester - 


75 


25 Worcestershire - 


102 


9 Berkshire - 


76 


26 Surrey 


105 


10 Somerset - 


76 


27 Rutland - 


110 


11 Bedfordshire 


76 


28 Cornwall - 


158 


12 Hunts 


78 


29 Shropshire 


166 


13 Kent 


79 


30 Staffs. 


204 


14 Dorset 


81 


31 Derby 


216 


15 Herts 


82 


32 Cheshire - 


279 


16 Wilts 


85 


33 Yorks 


497 


17 Bucks 


86 


34 Hants 


1011 



* Fractions omitted. 

It is in some respects, perhaps, rather remarkable that the 
first three most populous counties are Suffolk, Norfolk, and 
Essex ; but this seems to have been due to the wool (and 
other) trade with Flanders and the Continent, for it must 
be remembered that at that time the eastern counties' ports 
were much frequented. Next to these in population come 
the Southern and Midland counties. 

§ 36. The Wealth of various Districts. 

The distribution of wealth among the various counties 
is also interesting, as may be seen from the following table 
of the twenty-one leading counties of that time, with the 
approximate value of the rents paid by the manors therein, 
deduced from Domesday. 1 Here the Eastern and Southern 

1 This table is compiled from data given (for another purpose) by Pear- 
son, Hist, of Eng., Vol. I., Appx. D. Though necessarily only approxi- 
mate, it still seems fairly reliable. 



DOMESDAY BOOK AND THE MANORS 69 



counties rank highest, Kent coming first, then Essex, Norfolk, 
and Sussex, while Oxford takes rather a higher place, and 
Middlesex (excluding London) a low one. The table is as 
follows : — 



Order. 


County. 


Approx. Rental. 






£ s. d. 


1 


Kent - 


5717 6 7 


2 


Essex - 


4784 16 8 


3 


Norfolk - 


4514 11 7 


4 


Sussex - 


3436 12 


5 


Oxford - 


3242 2 11 


6 


Devon - 


3220 14 3 


7 


Gloucester - 


2827 6 8 


8 


Dorset - 


2656 9 8 


9 


Berks - 


2460 16 1 


10 


Northants - 


1843 7 


11 


Bucks - 


1813 7 9 


12 


Herts - 


1541 13 11 


13 


Surrey - 


1524 4 9 


14 


Warwick - 


1359 13 8 


15 


Bedford - 


1096 12 2 


16 


Worcester - 


991 6 


17 


Hunts - 


864 15 4 


18 


Middlesex 


754 7 8 


19 


Leicester - 


736 3 


20 


Cornwall - 


662 1 4 


21 


Derby - 


461 4 



Generally speaking, then, we may say that the east and 
south of England contained the richest, best tilled, and 
most populous parts of the country. Their downs and 
wolds afforded good pasturage for sheep and cattle, while 
the woods in every district formed excellent fattening 
grounds for swine, of which large numbers were kept. The 
hollows at the foot of the downs in the south and west, the 
river flats of the eastern counties, and the low gravel hills 
in other parts contained the best and easiest land to work. 
The chief towns 1 were London, Bristol, Norwich, Lincoln, 

1 Curiously enough, London, Bristol, and Winchester do not appear 
separately in the survey, but are only mentioned casually. For other 
important towns, cf. p. 89. 



70 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

Oxford, York, Exeter, and Winchester ; and Dover was 
also a place of considerable importance. But they were 
almost insignificant if we compare them with their modern 
dimensions. York had only some 1600 houses; 1 Norwich 
boasted not more than 1320 burgesses ; and it has been 
estimated that, generally speaking, from 7000 to 10,000 
people in all was " the population of a first class town." 2 They 
were, in fact, trading centres rather than seats of manufactur- 
ing industry. Although comparatively unimportant at the 
time of Domesday, they began to increase very much in pros- 
perity soon afterwards. There are 9250 manors enumerated 
in Domesday, and all except the towns above mentioned were 
practically what we should now call villages of no great size. 

§ 37. The Manors and Lords of the Manors. 
Of course each of these manors, after the Norman Conquest, 
was held by a " lord," who in turn held it more or less re- 
motely from the King. It is, in fact, the distinguishing 
feature of the Conquest, that William the Norman made him- 
self the supreme landowner of the country, so that all land 
was held under him. 3 He himself also, as a private land- 
owner, held a large number of manors, which were farmed 
by his bailiffs, and for each of these manors he was there- 
fore in a double sense the lord. But the majority of 
the manors in the country were held by his followers, the 
Norman nobles, and nearly all of them had several manors 
each. Now it was impossible for a noble to look after all 
his manors himself, even if he had wished it, since by 
William's cautious policy their lands had been assigned to 
them in various widely separated districts, 4 and some of 
them, again, had so many manors that personal supervision 
was impossible. 5 Nor was it always advisable to leave them 
merely to the care of bailiffs, and, therefore, naturally the 
great landowners used to sub-let some of their manors to 

1 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. 166. 

2 Pearson, Hist, of Eng., i. 381. 

3 Taswell-Langmead, Const. Hist., ch. ii. p. 49 ; Stubbs, I. ch. ix. p. 274. 

4 Stubbs, i. p. 272. 

5 Robert of Mortain held the largest number — viz., 793; but Odo of 
Bayeux had 439, and Alan of Brittany 442. The ancient demesne of the 
Crown consisted of 1422. Ellis, i. 225, 228. 



DOMESDAY BOOK AND THE MANORS 71 

other tenants — often to Englishmen who had submitted to 
the Norman Conquest. The nobles who held their land 
direct from the King were called tenants-in-chief, and 
those to whom they sub-let it were called tenants-in- 
mesne. But when a noble let a manor to a tenant-in- 
mesne, this tenant then for all practical purposes took his 
place, and became the " lord " of that manor. Thus, then, 
we find various kinds of manors — some owned directly by 
the King, others by the great nobles, and others again held 
by tenants-in -mesne. For instance, in the Domesday of 
Oxfordshire, 1 we find that one Milo Crispin, a tenant-in- 
chief, held a large number of manors from the King, but 
also let many to sub-tenants, that of Cuxham, e.g., being 
let to Alured, who was therefore its lord. So, too, in War- 
wickshire, the manor of Estone (now Aston) was one of 
those belonging to William Fitz-Ansculf, but he had let it 
to Godmund, an Englishman, who was therefore " lord of 
the manor of Estone." In many cases the lordship of a 
manor was vested to a monastery or abbey ; in fact, it is 
said that the Church held rather more than one- fifth of 
the whole land of the kingdom. 2 

§ 38. The Inhabitants of the Manor. 

The lord of the manor was a person of great importance, 
but of very varying social position. The great nobles, such 
as Odo of Bayeux, whose rent roll was well over £3000 
a year (an enormous sum for those days), or Robert of 
Mortain, who numbered his manors not by the score but 
by the hundred, held, of course, a rank equal to the noblest 
and richest of the Dukes of the present day. But there 
was a large number of lesser nobles, whose income varied 
from £300 to £500 a year, and also many county gentle- 
men, as we should call them, who, though tenants-in-chief 
and lords of manors, had a comparatively small income. 3 

1 See the survey for Oxfordshire in any reprint. 

2 Pearson reckons : the Crown held £, the Church tn, and the barons the 
remaining \ ; Hist, of Eng., i. 383. 

3 " Five to twenty pounds a year was no uncommon income for a gentle- 
man" (Pearson, Hist, of Eng., i. 384), but this must be multiplied by 20 
at least to give any idea of its value in modern figures. 



72 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

Besides the lord himself (whether King, noble, or sub- 
tenant), with his personal retainers, and generally a parish 
priest or some monks, there were three distinct classes of 
inhabitants — (1) First came the villani or villeins, who 
formed about 38 per cent. 1 of the total population recorded 
in Domesday, and were by far the most numerous and 
widely-spread class. 2 Their holdings differed in size, but on 
the average we may take them as occupying a virgate or 
yardland, which is equivalent to some 30 acres of arable 
land, and, of course, their holdings were scattered in plots 
among the common fields of the manor. The villeins also 
had a house in the village, and were often called virgarii 
or yardlings, from holding a virgate of land. (2) Next to 
the villeins came the cottars, or bordars, 3 a class distinct 
from and below the former, who probably held only some 
5 or 10 acres of land and a cottage, and did not even 
possess a plough, much less a team of oxen apiece, but had 
to combine among themselves for the purpose of ploughing. 
They form 32 per cent, of the Domesday population. 
Finally came (3) the slaves, who were much fewer in 
numbers than is commonly supposed, forming only 9 per 
cent, of the Domesday population. 4 Less than a century 
after the Conquest these disappear, and merge into the 
cottars. They should not be confused with either villeins 
or bordars, but Ellis is probably right in supposing that 
the servi correspond to the Saxon theow or esne, while the 
villeins correspond to the ceorls or churls, and that under 
the Norman system there was a continual approximation 
going on between them, the churls becoming degraded, and 
the position of the theows being improved, so that both 
were brought nearer together in the social scale. 5 

1 The percentages are given by Seebohm, Village Community, p. 86. 

2 Ellis tabulates 108,407 {Domesday, ii. 511). 

3 See Ellis, Domesday, ii. 511, and Birch, Domesday, pp. 141 and 154; 
also Ashley, Economic History, I. i. p. 18. Ellis tabulates 82,119 bordars, 
1749 " coseets," and 5054 cotarii. The terms coseet, cotsedae, coscez, cozets, 
coteri, cotmanni, cotarii seem to be used more or less of the same class. 
The exact status of the bordar and cottar has been the subject of much 
discussion, but probably the real distinction between them was very slight. 

4 In Ellis (ii. 511), 25,156 servi. 

5 Cf. Birch, Domesday, p. 170; Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. xi. p. 428. 



DOMESDAY BOOK AND THE MANORS 73 

§ 39. The Condition of these Inhabitants. 

The chief feature of the social condition of these classes 
of people was that they were subject to a lord. They each 
depended upon a superior, and no man could be either 
lordless or landless, for all persons in villeinage, which in- 
cluded every one below the lord of the manor, were subject 
to a master, and bound to the land, except, of course, " free 
tenants " (p. 75). But even against their lord the villeins 
had certain rights which were to be recognised ; x and they 
had, besides, many comforts and little responsibility, except 
to pay their dues to their lord. Moreover, it was possible for 
a villein to purchase a remission of his services, and become 
a " free tenant ; " or he might become such by residing in 
a town for a year and a day, and being a member of a 
town gild, as long as during that period he was unclaimed 
by his lord. 2 And in course of time the villein's position 
came to be this — he owed his lord the customary services 
(p. 75) whereby his lord's land was cultivated ; but his 
lord could not refuse him his customary rights in return — - 
" his house and lands, and rights of wood and hay " 3 — and 
in relation to every one but his lord he was a perfectly 
free citizen. His condition tended to improve 4 (at least in 
an economic sense), and by the time of the Great Plague 
(1348) a large number of villeins had become actually 
free, having commuted their services for money-payments. 5 
What these services were we shall now explain. But, 
finally, it should be pointed out that the state of villeinage 
and of serfage was practically the same thing in two aspects ; 
the first implying the fact that the villein was bound to the 
soil, the second that he was subject to the master. A serf 

1 Vinogradoff, V. in E., pp. 174, 176. The lord could even be fined for 
not fulfilling his village duties. Gomme, Vill. Comm., p. 117. 

2 Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. ch. xi. p. 421. 

3 Stubbs, II. xvi. p. 453. 

4 Seebohtn in Eng. Hist. Review, July 1892, vol. vii. 27, p. 457, who 
agrees with Thorold Rogers. Dr Stubbs and others hold a quite contrary 
view {Const. Hist, i. p. 427), but this is because they take into account 
only the legal status, not the economic condition of the villein. 

5 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 253. The process of commutation had 
probably begun before the Conquest. Ashley, Econ. Hist., I. ch. i. 
p. 22. 



74 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

was not a slave ; and, as we saw above, slaves became 
extinct soon after the Norman Conquest. 

§ 40. Services due to the Lord from his Tenants in Villeinage. 

Under the manorial system rent was paid in a very 
different manner from that in which it is paid to-day, for 
it was a rent not so much of money, though that was 
employed, as of services. The services thus rendered by 
tenants in villeinage, whether villeins or cottars, may be 
divided, although they present much variety, into week- 
work, 1 and boon-days or work on special days. 2 The week- 
work consisted of ploughing or reaping, or doing some 
other agricultural work for the lord of the manor for two 
or three days in the week, or at fixed times, such as at 
harvest ; while boon-day work was rendered at times not 
fixed, but whenever the lord of the manor might require it, 
though the number of boon-days in a year was limited. 3 
When, however, the villein or cottar had performed these 
liabilities, he was quite free to do work on his own land, 
or, for that matter, on anyone else's land, as indeed the 
cottars frequently did, for they had not much land of their 
own, and, therefore, often had time and labour to spare. 
It was from this cottar class with time to spare that a 
distinct wage-earning class, 4 like our modern labourers, 
arose, who lived almost entirely by wages. We shall hear 
more of them later on, but at the time of the Conquest 
not many such existed. 

§ 41. Money Payments and Rents. 

It was also usual for a tenant, besides rendering these 
servile services, to pay his lord a small rent either in money 
or kind, generally in both. Thus, on Cuxham manor, 5 we find 
a villein (or serf) paying his lord Jd. on November 12th 
every year, and Id. whenever he brews. He also pays, in 

1 " Wic-weorce," Rectitudines, 375 (Schmid). 

2 Seebohm, V. C, 41, 78. 3 At least by custom ; Seebohm, p. 79. 

4 Thorold Rogers, Hist of Agric, ii. 329, with his customary complete- 
ness, gives many instances of rates at which these farm servants were hired, 
including ploughmen, carters, shepherds, gardeners, cowherds, &c. , &c 

5 Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 40. 



DOMESDAY BOOK AND THE MANORS 75 

kind, 1 quarter of seed -wheat at Michaelmas ; 1 peck of 
wheat, 4 bushels of oats, and 3 hens od November 12th ; 
also 1 cock and 2 hens, and 2d. worth of bread every 
Christmas. His services are — to plough and till £-acre 
of the lord's land, to give 3 days' labour at harvest, and 
other days when required by the bailiff. This was the 
rent for about 12 or 15 acres of land (half a virgate), and, 
upon a calculation of the worth of labour and provisions at 
that time (end of thirteenth century), it comes to about 6d. 
an acre for his land and 3s. a year for his house and the 
land about it (curtilage). 

§ 42. Free Tenants. Soke-men. 

So far mention has been made only of tenants in villein- 
age ; but in the Domesday Book we find another class of 
tenants, called free, 1 who had to pay a fixed rent, either in 
money or kind, and sometimes in labour. This rent was 
fixed and unalterable in amount, and they were masters of 
their own actions as soon as it was paid. They were not 
like the villeins, bound to the soil, but could transfer their 
holdings, or even quit the manor if they liked. They were, 
however, subject to their lord's jurisdiction in matters of 
law, and hence were called soke-men (from soke or soc = 
jurisdiction exercised by a lord). 2 They also were bound 
to give military service when called upon, which the 
villeinage tenants had not to give. If they had any 
services to render, these were generally commuted into 
money payments ; and here we may observe that there 
was a constant tendency 3 from the Conquest to the time 
of the Great Plague (1348) towards this commutation. 
Villeins also could, and did frequently, commute their 
labour rents for money rents. 

In Domesday we find that the Eastern and East-central 
counties 4 were those in which " free " tenants or soke-men 

1 Liberi homines, sochemanni ; cf. Seebohm, V. C, pp. 87, 88. 2 lb. 

3 The whole of the services, both week-work and boon-days, are found 
occasionally commuted as early as 1240 ; Ashley, Econ. Hist., I. c, i. p. 31. 
Complete commutation became general by the reign of Edward II. Rogers, 
Six Centuries, p. 218. 

4 Ellis gives 10.097 liberi homines, of which more than half (5344) were 



76 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

were most prevalent. There they form from 27 to 45 per 
cent, of the inhabitants of those parts, though, taking all 
England into view, they only form 4 per cent, of the total 
population. 1 It is almost certain that they were of Danish 
or (later) of Norman origin ; for it is in the Danish 
districts that they are chiefly found, and their position is 
exceptional and privileged. The number of free tenants, 
however, was constantly increasing, even among tenants in 
villeinage, for the lord often found it more useful to have 
money, and was willing to allow commutation of services ; 
or, again, he might prefer not to cultivate all his own land 
(his demesne), but to let it for a fixed money rent not only 
to a freeman but to a villein 2 to do what he could with it, 
and thus the villein became a free man, while the lord 
was sure of a fixed sum from his land every year, whether 
the harvest were good or bad. 

§ 43. The Distinction between Free and Unfree Tenants. 

The classification of the inhabitants of the manors which 

we have just examined is based upon the classification of 

Domesday. But, like that of Domesday, though clear in 

its main features, it is rough and even artificial. In fact, 

being drawn up for the purposes of a fiscal survey, the 

Domesday inquirers classed the various kinds of tenants 

under heads " too few and simple to be accurate." In 

Domesday the demesne land is distinguished from land 

held " in villeinage," and the Book does not recognise free 

tenants (libere tenentes) on land in villeinage, because, for 

the purposes of the survey, such tenants were practically 

villeins, and, therefore, " unfree." But, as a matter of fact, 

there were in those times many people whom Domesday 

regarded simply as villani who were really more free than 

ordinary villeins. 3 But this the Norman surveyors, and 

in Suffolk ; also 2041 liberi homines commendati (1895 in Suffolk), and no less 
than 23,072 sochemanni. Introd., pp. 511-514. 

1 See also the maps in Seebohm, V. C. , p. 86. 

2 Ashley, Econ. Hist. , I. i. p. 27, who quotes the case of Ralph de Diceto 
in Domesday of St Paul's, 114. 

3 For instance, free men often took, in addition to their own land, a 
villein holding with the services attached to it, but still preserved their 
personal freedom. 



DOMESDAY BOOK AND THE MANORS 77 

the Norman lawyers of the same period, could not under- 
stand. 1 They were inclined to follow the theory of Roman 
Law, which recognised no middle position between freedom 
and slavery. As a matter of fact, we notice after the 
Conquest a continual attempt to degrade the villein in the 
eyes of the law by accentuating all the servile elements in 
his condition, and ignoring the very numerous elements 
that betoken some kind of freedom. 

It is no wonder, then, that we find a persistent tradition, 
to which modern investigation gives no slight support, to the 
effect that the freedom of the villein was greater in Saxon 
than in Norman times. 2 It is even held 3 that the privileged 
socmen represent a state of freedom that at one time was 
the normal condition of villeins. However this may be, we 
may arrive with some certainty at the conclusions already 
indicated 4 : (1) An analysis of the legal evidence of Norman 
times shows that the classification of society into villeins 
(or " unfree " men) and freeholders is comparatively late and 
artificial. 5 (2) For there existed between these two clearly- 
marked classes a large body of "customary" freeholders, 6 
and from these customary holders the ranks of the villeins 
were constantly recruited, as the legal minds of the day 
tended to debase the condition of freedom which the custom- 
ary holders possessed. But (3) originally the customary- 
freeholders formed the main bulk of the population. 

Now, the work of the statesmen and lawyers of Norman 
times tended to change the " customary " freedom of the 
villein into an almost complete servitude from the legal 
point of view. 7 But, on the other hand, economic forces 
were at work which tended inevitably to give the villein 
more and more practical, if not legal, freedom. The advan- 
tages of a settled government, the extension of commerce 
and manufactures, and the prosperity gained thereby under 

1 Domesday even regarded the free men in Kent and in Danish manors in 
Essex as villani. Vinogradoff, V. in E., p. 208. 

2 Vinogradoff, V. in E., p. 135, though Seebohm rather doubts it ; see his 
criticism in Eng. Hist. Review, July 1892, p. 449. 

3 Vinogradoff, p. 136. 4 P. 56. 

5 Villeinage in England, pp. 177, 220. 6 See p. 56 above. 

7 Cf. Vinogradoff, V. in E. , p. 45, and note. 



78 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

the cover of the law and order established very soon after 
the Conquest, all gave back to the villein tenants on' the 
economic and industrial side far more than the lawyers 
took away in legal definitions and status. 1 The economic 
effects of the new industry, commerce, and prosperity 
became the source of a practical freedom, 2 which existed 
none the less surely though it was persistently ignored by 
the lawyers ; and this practical freedom grew greater and 
greater, til] at last, in spite of legal definitions, villeinage 
became a state more of antiquarian than of actual interest. 
The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 opened the eyes of England 
to this fact, and from that year the death-knell of villeinage 
as a practical institution was already sounded. 

§ 44. Illustrations of Manors from Domesday. 

But this is greatly to anticipate the story of industrial 
development. We must return to the manors of Norman 
days, and it will perhaps be well to give two illustrations 
drawn from the Domesday Book (eleventh century) and from 
bailiffs' accounts of a later period (end of thirteenth century). 

First, we will take a manor in Warwickshire in the 
Domesday Survey 3 (1089) — Estone, now Aston, near Bir- 
mingham. It was one of a number belonging to William, 
the son of Ansculf, who was tenant-in-chief, but had let it 
to one Godmund, a sub-tenant, or tenant-in-mesne. The 
Survey runs — " William Fitz- Ansculf holds of the King 
Estone, and Godmund of him. There are 8 .hides. 4 The 
arable employs 20 ploughs; in the demesne the arable 
employs 6 ploughs, but now there are no ploughs. There 
are 30 villeins with a priest, aDd 1 bondsman, aud 12 
bordars {i.e., cottars). They have 18 ploughs. A mill pays 

1 This follows the view of Seebohm {cf his remarks in Eng. Hist. Rev. , 
July 1892, p. 457). 

2 A serf or villein could in later days even become a knight, as did Sir 
Robert Sale, or a bishop, as did Grostete of Lincoln. Rogers, Six Cen- 
turies, p. 32. 

3 Domesday of Warwick, q.v. 

4 A hide varied in size, and was (after the Conquest) equal to a carucate, 
which might be anything from 80 to 120 or 180 acres. See Cunningham, 
Growth of Eng. Industry, i. 120, and cf. note 1, p. 6c above. 



DOMESDAY BOOK AND THE MANORS 79 

three shillings. The woodland is three miles long and half-a- 
mile broad. It was worth £4 ; now 100 shillings." 

Here we have a good example of a manor held by a sub- 
tenant, and containing all the three classes mentioned be- 
fore in this chapter — villeins, cottars, and slaves (i.e., bonds- 
men). The whole manor must have been about 5000 
acres, of which 1000 were probably arable land, which was 
of course parcelled out in strips among the villeins, the lord, 
and the priest. As there were only 18 ploughs among 30 
villeins, it is evident that some of them at least had to use 
a plough and oxen in common. The demesne land does not 
seem to have been well cultivated by Godmund the lord, for 
there were no ploughs on it, though it was large enough to 
employ six. Perhaps Godmund, being an Englishman, had 
been fighting the Normans in the days of Harold, and had 
let it go out of cultivation, or perhaps the former owner 
had died in the war, and Godmund had rented the land 
from the Norman noble to whom William gave it. 

§ 45. Cuxham Manor in the Eleventh and Thirteenth 
Centuries. 

Our second illustration can be described at two periods 
of its existence — at the time of Domesday and 200 years 
later. It was only a small manor of some 500 acres, and 
was held by a sub-tenant from a Norman tenant-in-chief, 
Milo Crispin. It is found in the Oxfordshire Domesday, in 
the list of lands belonging to Milo Crispin. The Survey 
says : " Alured [the sub-tenant] now holds 5 hides for a 
manor in Cuxham. Land for 4 ploughs ; now in the 
demesne, 2 ploughs and 4 bondsmen. And 7 villeins with 
4 bordars have 3 ploughs. There are 3 mills of 18 
shillings ; and 18 acres of meadow. It was worth £3, now 
£6." Here, again, the three classes of villeins, cottars or 
bordars, and slaves are represented. The manor was 
evidently a good one, for though smaller than Estone, it was 
worth more, and has three mills and good meadow land as 
well. Now, by the end of the thirteenth century this 
manor had passed into the hands of Merton College, 
Oxford, which then represented the lord, but farmed it by 



80 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

means of a bailiff. Professor Thorold Rogers gives us a 
description of it, 1 drawn from the annual accounts of this 
bailiff, which he examined along with many others from 
other manors. We find one or two changes have taken 
place, for the bondsmen have entirely disappeared, as 
indeed they did in less than a century after the Conquest 
all through the land. The number of villeins and bordars 
has increased, for there are now 13 villeins and 8 cottars 
and 1 free tenant. There is also a prior, who holds land 
(6 acres) in the manor but does not live in it ; also two 
other tenants, who do not live in the manor, but hold " a 
quarter of a knight's fee" (here some 40 or 50 acres) — 
a knight's fee 2 comprising an area of land varying from 
2 hides to 4 or even 6 hides, but in any case worth 
some £20. As the Cuxham land was good, the quantity 
necessary for the valuation of a fee would probably be only 
the small hide or carucate of 80 acres, and the quarter of 
it, of course, 2 acres or a little more. The 1 3 serfs hold 
170 acres, but the 8 cottars only 30 acres, including their 
tenements. The free tenant holds 12f acres, and Merton 
College as lord of the manor some 240 acres of demesne. 
There are now two mills instead of three, one belonging to 
the prior and the other to another tenant. There were alto- 
gether, counting the families of the villeins and cottars, but not 
the two tenants of military fees, about 60 or 70 inhabitants, 
the most important being the college bailiff and the miller. 

§ 46. Description of a Manor Village. 

Now in both these country manors, as in all others, the 
central feature would be the dwelling of the lord, or manor- 
house. It was substantially built, and served as a court- 
house for the sittings of the court baron and the court leet* 

1 Six Centuries, p. 41. 

2 It is very difficult to state exactly what a knight's fee really was ; 
Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. xi. p. 431. Cf. Pearson, Early and Middle 
Ages, i. 375, and ii. 463, who puts it at about 5 hides, or a rental of £20. 

3 Manorial Courts. — The court baron was composed of a kind of jury of 
freeholders, and was concerned with civil proceedings. The court leet was 
composed of all tenants, both free and serf, who acted as a jury in 
criminal cases, minor offences, and so forth. Both courts were presided 



DOMESDAY BOOK AND THE MANORS 81 

If the lord did not live in it, his bailiff did so, and perhaps 
the lord would come occasionally himself to hold these 
courts, or his bailiff might preside. Near the manor- 
house generally stood the church, often large for the 
size of the village, because the nave was frequently used as 
a town-hall for meetings or for markets. 1 Then there 
would be the house of the priest, possibly in the demesne ; 
and after these two the most important building was the 
mill, which, if there was a stream, would be placed on its 
banks in order to use the water-power. The rest of the 
tenants generally inhabited the principal street or road 2 of 
the village, near the stream, if oue ran through the place. 
The average population of an eleventh century village 
must have been about 150 persons. 3 The houses of these 
villages were poor and dirty, not always made of stone, 
and never (till the fifteenth century) of brick, 4 but built of 
posts wattled and plastered with clay or mud, 5 with an 
upper storey of poles reached by a ladder. The articles of 
furniture would be very coarse and few, being necessarily 
of home manufacture ; a few rafters or poles overhead, a 
bacon-rack, and agricultural tools being the most conspicuous 
objects. Chimneys were unknown, except in the manor- 
houses, and so too were windows, and the floor was of bare 
earth. Outside the door was the " mixen," a collection of 
every kind of manure and refuse, 6 which must have ren- 
dered the village street alike unsavoury, unsightly, and 

over by the lord of the manor or his bailiff, Thus local discipline and law 
was concentrated in the hands of the inhabitants of the parish themselves, 
and the manorial courts were a very useful means of education in local 
self-government. Unfortunately their power, utility, and educational 
influence declined with the decay of the whole manorial system. Cf. 
Rogers, Six Centuries, pp. 63 and 420 ; Stubbs, Const. Hist. , I. xi. 399 ; 
Maitland, Select Pleas, I. lxv. ; and Yinogradoff, V. in E. , pp. 362, 365, and 
ch. v. of Essay II. 
1 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 66. 2 Gomme, Vill. Comm., p. 173. 

3 We can easily compute this by dividing the Domesday population 
(283,342) by the number of manors (9250), which gives about 30 able-bodied 
men per village, or 150 persons if we multiply by five. 

4 Rogers, Econ. Interpretation of History, p. 279. 

5 Cf. Gomme, Vill. Comm. , p. 44. 

6 This is very noticeable in certain villages of the Belgian Ardennes — 
e.g., Sommiere, near Dinant. 

F 



82 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

unwholesome. But though their life was rude and rough, it 
seems that the villagers were fairly happy, and, considering all 
things, not much worse off than their descendants are now. 1 
Of course it is very difficult to compare the life of different 
ages, especially of periods so diverse as the eleventh or 
thirteenth century and the nineteenth. But it would be 
true to say that a mediaeval labourer was often better oft 
as regards food 2 than the unskilled labourer of to-day, 
though, on the other hand, he may have been worse clad 
and worse housed. One thing, perhaps, balances another. 
Yet probably the social life of the mediaeval village, 
with its active manor courts and parish councils, was 
more interesting than that of a nineteenth century 
country parish, and the villager, though a villein, had a 
greater voice in parish affairs than his modern repre- 
sentative, except quite recently, possessed. 

It is necessar} 7 , in order to complete our sketch of the 
manorial system from the time of the Conquest onwards, to 
understand how the land was divided up. We may say 
that there were seven kinds of land altogether. (1) First 
came the lord's land round about the manor-house, the 
demesne land, which was strictly his own, and generally 
cultivated in early times by himself or his bailiff. All 
other land held by tenants was called land in villeinage. 
(2) Next came the arable land of the village, held by the 
tenants in common fields. 5 Now these fields were all 
divided up into many strips, and tenants held their strips 
generally in quite different places, all mixed up in any order 4 

1 1 am inclined to follow the view of Thorold Rogers in this (cj. Six Cen- 
turies, pp. 68, 69), with whom Dr Cunningham, after all, practically agrees 
{Eng. Industry, i. 275). In estimating comparative prosperity, we must 
regard the possibilities of each age, and how far the villager attained them 
then or can do so now. Almost certainly he came nearer to such 
possibilities as there were than his modern brother does. Hasty denials 
of mediaeval prosperity and comfort only betoken ignorance. 

2 Cunningham, i. 275. 

3 Seebohm, Vill. Comm., pp. 1-27, and the maps there ; Gomme, VillageCom- 
munity, pp. 194, 166 ; Cunningham, Eng. Industry and Commerce, i. 70, 71. 

4 "A single farmer might have to cut his portion of grass from twenty 
different places, though the tenants frequently accommodated one another 
by exchanging allotments when it was convenient to do so." Gomme, 
Vill. Comm., p. 166. 



DOMESDAY BOOK AND THE MANORS 83 

(cf. diagram, where the tenants are marked A, B, C, &c). 
The lord * and the parson might also have a few strips in 
these fields. There were at least three fields, in order to 
allow the rotation of crops mentioned before (p. 40). Each 
tenant held his strip only till harvest, after which all fences 
and divisions were taken away, and the cattle turned out 
to feed on the stubble. (3) Thirdly came the common 
pasture, for all the tenants. But each tenant was restricted 
or stinted in the number of cattle that he might pasture, 2 
lest he should put on too many, and thus not leave enough 
food for his neighbours' cattle. Sometimes, however, we 
find pasture without stint, as in Port Meadow at Oxford to 
this day. 3 (4) Then comes the forest or woodland, as in 
Estone, which belonged to the lord, who owned all the 
timber. But the tenants had rights, such as the right of 
lopping and topping certain trees, collecting fallen branches 
for fuel, and the right of " pannage " — i.e., of turning cattle, 
especially swine, into the woods to pick up what food they 
could. (5) There was also in most manors what is called 
the waste — i.e., uncultivated land, affording rough pasture, 
and on which the tenants had the right of cutting turf and 
bracken for fuel and fodder. Then near the stream there 
would perhaps be some (6) Meadow land, as at Cuxham, 
but this generally belonged to the lord, who, if he let it 
out, always charged an extra rent (and often a very high 
one), 4 for it was very valuable as affording a good supply of 
hay for the winter. Lastly, if the tenant could afford it, 
and wanted to have other land besides the common fields, 
where he could let his cattle lie, or to cultivate the ground 
more carefully, he could occupy (7) a close, or a portion of 
land specially marked off and let separately. 5 The lord 
always had a close on his demesne, and the chief tenants 
would generally have one or two as well. The close land was 
of course rented more highly than land in the common fields. 
The accompanying diagram shows a typical manor, held 
by a sub-tenant from a tenant-in-chief, who holds it of the 
king. It contains all the different kinds of land, though, 

1 Vinogradov V. in E. , p. 406. 2 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 90. 

3 lb., p. 74. 4 lb., p. 73. 5 lb., p 89. 



8 4 



INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 



of course, they did not always all exist in one manor. 
It also shows the manor-house, church, mill, and village. 

The King (supreme landlord). 

I 

Tenant-in- chief, owning various manors. 

A Sub-tenant, or tenant-in -mesne, the lord of the _ 
manor below. 




§ 47. The Decay of the Manorial System. 
Such, then, was the manorial village and the-jaianoriaL — 
;em generally in the eleventh century, and thus it lasted__ 



DOMESDAY BOOK AND THE MANORS 85 

for two or three centuries more. But in course of time it 
cffed out, though survivals of it last even to our own 
day. 

The decay of this social and economic system begins 
most clearly and markedly with the changes made by the 
Black Death (1348), and by the social revolution which 
followed it, of which the Peasants' Revolt was the first 
and most startling symptom (cf. ch. xii.). The legisla- 
tion of Edward I. forms, again, another epoch from which 
to date the decay of manorial institutions. He laid the 
foundations of a svstem of national instead of local resju- 
lations for industry, and from that time forward the 
essentiallv local arrangements of the manors began to lose 
both their necessity and their utility. 1 As Dr Cunningham 
says — " In regard to commerce, manufactures, and to agri- 
culture alike, the local authorities were gradually overtaken 
and superseded by the increasing activity of Parliament, 
till, in the time of Elizabeth, the work was practically 
finished." 2 The essentially local and personal relations of 
the manor gave way to the more general and impersonal 
relations of national government and national economy. 

1 Cunningham, Industry and. Commerce, i. pp. 241-245. 2 lb., p. 243. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE TOWNS AND THE GILDS 

§ 48. The Origin of the Towns. 

As in the case of the village, so also the town, in 
the modern sense of the word, had its origin in the 
primitive settlements of the people. The only differ- 
ence between a town and a village lay, originally, in 
the number of inhabitants, and in the fact that the town 
was a more defensible place than the rural settlement, since 
it probably had a rampart or a moat surrounding it instead 
of the mere hedges which ran round the villages. 1 It was 
simply in the Anglo-Saxon period a more strictly organised 
form of the village community. 2 In itself it was merely a 
manor or group of manors ; as Professor Freeman puts it, 
one part of the district where men lived closer together 
than elsewhere. 3 The town had at first a constitution 
like that of the primitive village, but its inhabitants had 
gradually gained certain rights and functions of a special 
nature. 4 These rights and privileges had sometimes been 
received from the lord of the manor on which the town 
had grown up 5 ; for towns, especially provincial towns, 
were often at first only dependent manors, which gained 
safety and solidity under the protection of some great 
noble, prelate, or the king himself ; 6 who finally would 
grant the town thus formed a charter. 7 

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. v. 92. The Anglo-Saxons called them " burh" 
— i.e., "boroughs." 2 lb. 3 Norman Conquest, v. p. 470. 

4 Thus Lincoln, Stamford, and other towns had certain rights of juris- 
diction, sac and soc ; Domesday (Lincoln). 

5 In other cases they were probably the inherited rights of a free com- 
munity. 

6 Stubbs, Const. Hist. , I. v. p. 93, who quotes examples of the eorles tun, 
cyninges burh, cyninges tun. 

7 This charter would give rights of jurisdiction over the citizens, of taking 
toll, &c. ; cf. Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. v. 106. Such rights were also granted 
to private individuals. 

86 



THE TOWNS AND THE GILDS 87 

§ 49. Rise of Towns in England. 

Towns first became important in England towards the 
end of the Saxon period. Saxon England had never been 
a settlement of towns, but of villages or manors. Bat 
gradually towns developed, though differing widely in the 
circumstances and manner of their growth. Some grew 
up in the fortified camps of the invaders themselves, 1 as 
being in a secure position ; some arose from a later occupa- 
tion of the once sacked and deserted Roman towns. 2 Many 
grew silently in the shadow of a great abbey or monastery. 3 
Of this class was Oxford, which first came into being round 
the monasteries of Osney and S. Frideswide. Others 
clustered round the country houses of some Saxon king or 
earl. 4 Several important boroughs owed their rise to the 
convenience of their site as a port or a trading centre. 
This was the origin of the growth of Bristol, whose rise 
resulted directly from trade ; 5 and London of course had 
always been a port of high commercial rank. 6 A few other 
towns, like Scarborough and Grimsby, 7 were at first only 
small havens for fishermen. But all the English towns 
were far less flourishing before the arrival of the Normans 
than they afterwards became. 

The influence of the Danes, however, should be noted as 

1 Especially in the case of the Danes ; Cunningham, Growth of Industry, 
i. 91 ; Green, Hist, of Eng. People, i. 207. 

2 Some of the Roman towns never quite lost their continuity of life ; cf. 
Jessop, Studies by a Recluse, p. 120, who instances London, Chester, 
Lincoln, and Exeter ; cf. also Green, History, i. 207. 

3 Stubbs, I. v. 93 ; Freeman, Norman Conquest, v. 471 ; Rogers, Six 
Centuries, p. 103. 

4 Green {History, i. 207) evidently follows Stubbs, u.s. 

5 From very early times it had an active trade with Ireland ; cf. Cun- 
ningham, Growth of Industry, i. 89, note ; and Craik, British Commerce, 
i. 72. 

6 Probably it was originally a hill-fort ; and its name is said to mean 
the "hill fort by the water." Its importance in Roman times was very 
great ; Green, Making of England, p. 3. In Saxon times it was left much 
to itself, but hedged in with a ring of Saxon agricultural settlements. 
Gomme, Village Comm., p. 52. 

7 A fair attended by foreign merchants was held in Saxon times on 
Scarborough beach ; Cunningham, i. 82, n. Grimsby merchants are men- 
tioned in Rymer, Foedera, II. i. 110, 133. See also Rogers, Six Centuries, 
104. 



88 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

promoting the growth of towns. Though undoubtedly 
pirates, the Danish invaders were often also merchants, and 
often planted villages at centres suitable for commerce, or 
stimulated by their trade the growth of places which but 
j for their coming might have remained undeveloped. 1 More- 
over, it is the towns of Danish origin that frequently show 
the most ancient municipal organisation ; as the records 
of the five " Danish boroughs " — Nottingham, Derby, Lin- 
coln, Stamford, and Leicester — go to prove. 2 Even to-day 
near the heart of modern London the Church of St Clement 
Danes reminds us of those rough seafaring men, half 
pirates half traders, whose patron saint was Clement with 
his anchor. 3 

§ 50. Towns in Domesday. 

If now we once more go back to our great authority, the 
survey made by William the Norman, we find that the 
status of the towns or boroughs is clearly recognised, though 
they are now regarded as held by the lord of the manor 
"in demesne," or, in default of a lord, as part of the king's 
demesne. 4 Thus Northampton at that time was a town in 
the king's demesne ; Beverley was held in demesne by the 
Archbishop of York. 5 It was possible, too, that one town 
might belong to several lords, because it spread over, or 
was an aggregate of, several manors or townships. Thus 
Leicester 6 seems to have included four manors, which were 
thus held in demesne by four lords — one by the king, 
another by the Bishop of Lincoln, another by a noble, 
Simon de Senlis, and the fourth by Ivo of Grantmesnil, the 
sheriff. In later times it was held under one lord, Count 
Robert of Meulan, who had acquired the four portions for 
himself. 

Now, in the Domesday Book there is mention made of 
forty-one provincial cities or boroughs, most of them being 

1 Cunningham, i. 88. 

2 Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. ch. v. p. 93. For many years these five towns 
held together in a confederation which was the backbone of Danish power 
in the Midlands; cf. Jessop, Studies, p. 126. 

3 For Danish influence see York Powell, Eng. Hist. Review, No. XVII. 
p. 134. i Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. xi. 408. 5 lb., p. 409. 6 lb. 



THE TOWNS AND THE GILDS 89 

the county towns of the present day. 1 There are also ten 
fortified towns of greater importance than the others. They 
are Canterbury, York, Nottingham, Oxford, Hereford, 
Leicester, Lincoln, Stafford, Chester, and Colchester. 1 
London was a town apart, as it had always been, and was 
the only town which had an advanced civic constitution, 
being regulated by a port-reeve and a bishop, 2 and having 
a kind of charter, though afterwards the privileges of this 
charter were much increased. London w T as of course a 
great port and trading centre, and had many foreign 
merchants in it. It was then, as well as in subsequent 
centuries, the centre of English national life, and the voice 
of its citizens counted for something in national affairs. 3 
The other great ports of England at that time were Bristol, 
Southampton, 4 and Norwich, 5 and as trade grew and pros- 
pered, many other ports rose into prominence (see p. 144). 
There w 7 ere also other towns which grew up merely as 
aggregates of traders, and had not acquired as yet any other 
cohesion than as organised communities. These formed 
the large class of mere market town's t which of course still 
exist in large numbers, still serving the purpose to which 
they originally owed their existence without growing much 
beyond their old proportions. 

§ 51. Special Privileges of Toivns. 

It is not till the twelfth century that the towns begin to 
have an independent municipal history as self-governing 
boroughs, 6 nor is it till the fifteenth century that we come 
to advanced municipal life and organisation. But, even at 
the time of the Norman Conquest, most towns, though 
small, were of sufficient importance to have a certain status 
of their own, with definite privileges. 7 The privilege they 
strove for first of all was generally an immunity from appear- 
ing before the Court of Appeal where the king's officer 

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist,, I. xi. 403. 2 lb., p. 404. 

3 Cf. Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 109. 

4 It was the chief port of Southern England ; Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 104. 

5 lb., p. 106. It was famed for its harbour; and, like many another 
disused port of the east coast, did a large trade with the Netherlands. 

6 Mrs Green, Town Life, i. p. 11. 7 Stubbs, I. xi. 408. 



INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

presided and levied his fees; 1 but perhaps the most im- 
portant privilege was the second one — -the immunity from 
the personal taxation exacted by the officers of the Royal 
Exchequer, and collected by the sheriff. 2 To gain their 
points they asked, first, the rights of choosing their own 
justiciar, 3 or official who should preside in the town court 
and relieve them from the necessity of appearing at other 
courts ; and then they requested the liberty of taxing them- 
selves, and of composition for taxation — i.e., the right of 
paying a fixed sum or rent to the Crown, instead of the 
various tallages, taxes, and imposts that might be required 
of other places. 4 This fixed sum, 5 or composition, was 
called the firrna bwrgi, and by the time of the Conquest 
was nearly always paid in money. Previously it had been 
paid both in money and kind, for we find Oxford paying to 
Edward the Confessor six sectaries of honey as well as £20 
in coin ; while to William the Norman it paid £60 as an 
inclusive lump sum. 6 By the end of the Norman period 7 
all the towns had secured the firma burgi, and the right of 
assessing it themselves, instead of being assessed by the 
sheriff; they had the right also of choosing an officer of 
their own, instead of the king's bailiff or reeve. They had 
thus their own tribunals, a charter for their customs, and 
special rules of local administration, and, generally speaking, 
had gained entire judicial and commercial freedom. 

§ 52. How the Towns obtained their Charters. 

It is interesting to see what circumstances helped forward 
this emancipation of the towns from the rights possessed by 
the nobles and the abbeys, 8 or by the king. The chief 
cause of the readiness of the nobles and kings to grant 

1 Jessop, Studies of a Recluse, p. 130. 2 lb. 

3 As in the Charter to London given by Henry I. , quoted by Stubbs, 
ut ante, p. 405. 4 Stubbs, u. s. , p. 410. 

5 Ellis, Introd. to Domesday, i. 190, gives many examples. 

6 Ellis, Introd., i. 193. 7 Stubbs, u. s., p. 424. 

8 A noble, bishop, or abbot on whose demesne a town existed of course 
had the judicial and other rights of a lord of the manor over such a town, 
and could part with them by giving a charter. Thus Beverley gained its 
charter, not from the crown, but from Archbishop Thurstan. Of. Stubbs, 
Const. Hist., I. xi. 411. Manchester remained under its feudal lord till 1846. 



THE TOWNS AND THE GILDS 91 

charters during this period (from the Conquest to Henry 
III.) was their lack of ready money. Everyone knows how 
fiercely the nobles fought against each other in Stephen's 
reign, and how enthusiastically they rushed off to the 
Crusades under Richard I. They could not indulge their 
love of fighting, which in their eyes was their main duty, 
without money to pay for their fatal extravagances in this 
direction, and to get money they frequently parted with 
their manorial rights over the towns which had grown up 
on their estates. 1 Especially was this the case when a 
noble or king was taken prisoner, and wanted the means 
of his ransom. 2 In this way Portsmouth and Norwich 
gained their charters by paying part of Richard I.'s ransom 
(1194). Again, Rye and Winchelsea gained theirs by 
supplying the same king (in 1191) with two ships for one 
of his Eastern crusades. 3 Many other instances might be 
quoted from the cases of nobles who also gave charters 
when setting out upon these extraordinary expeditions. 
Indeed, the Crusades had a very marked influence in this 
way upon the growth of English towns. Some one had to 
pay for the wars in which the aristocracy delighted, and it 
is well to remember the fact that the expenses of all our 
wars — and they have been both numerous and costly — 
have been defrayed by the industrial portion of the com- 
munity. Even the glories and cruelties of that often savage 
age of so-called knightly chivalry/ which has been idealised 
and gilded by romancers and history-mongers, with its 
tournaments and torture-chambers, were paid for by that de- 
spised industrial population of the towns and villages which 
contained the real life and wealth of mediaeval England. 

§ 53. The Gilds and the Towns. Various hinds of 
Gilds. 

But besides the indirect effect of the Crusades, there 
was another powerful factor in the growth and emancipa- 
tion of the towns after the Conquest. I refer to the 
merchant gilds, which were becoming more and more pro- 

1 Cunningham, Growth of Industry ', i. p. 198. 

2 Green, History, i. 212. 3 See Rymer, Foedera, I. 63, 53. 
4 Cf. the state of things instanced by Green, History, i. 156. 



92 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

minent all through this period, though the height of their 
power was not reached till the fourteenth century. These 
merchant gilds were one of four other kinds of gilds, 
all of which seem to have been similar in origin. The 
earliest gilds are found in Saxon times, 1 and were very 
much what we understand by clubs at the present day. At 
first they were associations for more or less religious and 
charitable purposes, 2 and formed a sort of artificial family, 
whose members were bound by the bond not of kinship but 
of an oath, while the gild-feast, held once a month in the 
common hall, replaced the family gatherings of kinsfolk. 
These gilds were found both in towns and villages, but 
chiefly in the former, where men were brought more closely 
together. Besides (1) the religious gilds, we find in 
Saxon times (2) the frith gilds, 3 formed for mutual assist- 
ance in case of violence, wrong, or false accusation, or in 
any legal affairs. But this class of gilds died out after the 
Conquest. The most important were (3) the merchant 
gilds mentioned above, which existed certainly in Edward 
the Confessor's time, being called in Saxon ceapemanne gilds, 
and they were recognised at the time of the Conquest, for 
they are recorded in Domesday here and there as possessing 
lands. 4 The merchant members of these gilds had various 
privileges, such as a virtual monopoly of the local trade of 
a town, which even outsiders were not allowed to infringe, 
and freedom from certain imposts. 5 They had, at any rate at 
first, a higher rank than the members of the (4) craft gilds. 6 
These last were associations of handicraftsmen, or artisans, 
and were separate from the merchant gilds, though also of 
great importance. If a town were large enough, each craft 
or manufacture had a gild of its own, though perhaps in 
smaller towns members of various crafts would form only 
one gild. Such gilds were found, too, not only in towns 
but in country villages, as is known, e.g., in the case of 

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist, I. xi. p. 41 1 , who gives an excellent summary. Gf. 
also Brentano, History and Development of Gilds, and Gross, Gild Merchant, 
for further information. 2 Stubbs, ut ante, p. 412. 

3 They were possibly earlier than the religious associations. Gf. Stubbs, 
ut ante, p. 414. 4 lb. , p. 416. 

5 Gross, Gild Merchant, i. 44. 6 Stubbs, ut ante, p. 417. 



THE TOWNS AND THE GILDS 93 

some Norfolk villages, where remains of their halls have 
been found. 1 Their gild feasts are probably represented to 
this day in the parish feasts, survivals of ancient custom. 

§ 54. How the Merchant Gilds helped the Qrowth of 
Toivns. 

Now it was only natural that the existence of these 
powerful associations in the growing boroughs should secure 
an increasing development of cohesion and unity among 
the townsmen. Moreover, the merchant gilds had a very 
important privilege, which would make many outsiders 
anxious to join their ranks — namely, that membership in a 
gild for a year and a day made a villein a free man. 2 Thus 
the gilds included all the free tenants in a town, and very 
often the body of free citizens, who, of course, as free men, 
formed the only really influential class in a town, found 
themselves, by thus uniting together in a gild, " craft," or 
" mistery," in a position to gain even greater influence 
than before. In fact, only those who were members of some 
gild or " mistery " were allowed to take part in the muni- 
cipal government of their town. 3 As time went on, and 
their influence grew, it became the special endeavour of 
the gildmen to obtain from the Crown or from their lord of 
the manor wider commercial privileges, such as grants of 
coinage, the right of holding fairs, and of exemption from 
tolls. 4 Then they asked for freedom of justice, and for the 
right of self-government ; and it is supposed also that it was 
possibly the gilds also, as representing practically the town 
itself, who bought up the firma burgi, 5 and thus became 
their own assessors of taxes. Finally, no doubt, they helped 
largely in buying a charter, as we have seen, from a king or 
noble in need of ready money. And so, gradually, and by 
other steps which cannot now be clearly traced, the eman- 
cipation of the towns was won by the gilds ; the boroughs 
became free from their lords' restrictions and dues ; till by 
the end of the twelfth century chartered towns, which were 

1 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 417. 2 Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. xi. p. 417. 

3 Ashley, Economic Hist. , II. i. 26. 

4 Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. ix. p. 425. 5 lb. t p. 416. 



94 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

very few at the time of the Conquest, became the general 
rule. In later times, again, the power of the gilds passed 
to the town corporations. 1 Yet at no time can we say 
that the governing body of the town was identical in idea 
with the merchant gild. 2 It is true that in time member- 
ship of some gild became indispensable to the status of a 
burgher, 3 but still the gild was theoretically distinct from 
the municipal body, though practically it was generally one 
and the same. The chief result of the gilds and of gild- 
life was to produce greater unity and cohesion among the 
townsmen, 4 and thus to awake in them the idea of the cor- 
porate unity of municipal life. 

§ 55. How the Graft Gilds helped Industry. 

So far we have specially noted the work of the merchant 
gilds, which, as it were, built up the constitution and free- 
dom of the towns. But the craft gilds did similar work 
also. Originally, it is true, the merchant gilds reckoned 
themselves above the craft gilds ; but in later times the 
two classes came, so to speak, to stand more side by side 5 ; 
and each class of gild occupied the same relation to the 
municipal government, though very often the members of 
each might vary greatly in wealth or position 6 — from the 
poor cobbler, who was yet a member of the shoemakers' gild, 
to the rich merchant of drapery, who might have held the 
highest municipal honours. 

We must now look for a moment at the work of the 
artisans' gilds, or craft gilds, which afterwards became very 
important. 7 These are found not only in London but in 
provincial towns. The London weavers are mentioned as 
a craft gild in the time of Henry I. (1100 A.D.), 8 and most 
of these gilds seemed to have existed already for a long 
period. The Goldsmiths' Gild claimed to have possessed 
land before the Norman Conquest, and it was fairly power- 
ful in the days of Henry II. (1180 A.D.), for he found it 

1 Ashley, Econ. Hist., II. i., p. 13. 

2 Stubbs, ut supra, p. 418. 3 lb., p. 425. 4 lb., p. 425. 
5 Ashley, Econ. Hist., II. i. p. 24. 6 lb., p. 25. 

7 They were, perhaps, more often known as "crafts," " misteries," or 
" companies." 8 Cunningham, English Industry (1882), 132. 



THE TOWNS AND THE GILDS 95 

convenient to try and suppress it. 1 But it did not receive 
the public recognition of a charter till the fourteenth cen- 
tury. They arose, of course, first in the towns, and origin- 
ally seem to have consisted of a small body of the leading 
men of a particular craft, to whom was confided the regula- 
tion of a particular industry, probably as soon as that 
industry was thought of sufficient importance to be regulated. 
In the fifteenth century they became so universal that every 
trade which occupied as many as twenty men in a town had 
a gild of its own. 2 The gild tried to secure good work on 
the part of its members, 3 and attempted to suppress the 
production of wares by irresponsible persons who were not 
members of the craft. 4 Their fundamental principle was, 
that a member should work not only for his own private 
advantage but for the reputation and good of his trade — 
" for the honour of the good folks of such misteries." 5 
Hence bad work was punished, and it is curious to note 
that night-work was prohibited as leading to poor work. 6 
The gild also took care to secure a supply of competent 
workmen for the future (and at the same time to restrain 
competition) by training a limited number of young people 
in its particular industry. Hence arose the system of each 
" master " having apprentices ; and though in earlier times it 
does not seem to have been necessary that a person must 
pass through an apprenticeship before being admitted a 
member of a craft or mistery, in later days this rule was 
rigidly enforced. 7 The gild, moreover, exercised some kind 
of moral control over its members, and secured their good 
behaviour, thus forming an effective branch of the social 
police. 8 On the other hand, it had many of the character- 
istics of a benefit society, providing against sickness and 
death among those belonging to it, as indeed all gilds did. 9 
At the end of the fourteenth century it is noticeable that 

1 Ashley, Econ. Hist., I. ii. 81. 2 Ashley, ut supra, II. ii. p. 74. 

3 Ashley, Econ. Hist. , II. ii. p. 72. 4 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 107. 

5 See the Royal Order of Edward III. , quoted by Bain, Merchant and 
Craft Gilds, p. 40. 

6 Cunningham, i. p. 314. 7 Ashley, Econ. Hist. , II. ii. p. 84. 

8 Ochenkowski, England's Wirthschaftl. Entwickelung, p. 66. 

9 Rogers, Six Centuries, pp. 110, 347. 



96 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

the custom was growing of erecting special " houses", or 
" halls " for the gilds, these buildings being duly provided 
with the social and religious appurtenances of kitchen, 
chapel, and often also almshouses. 1 

These institutions, however, did not apparently only 
belong to the towns, but were found in country districts 
also ; thus we hear of the carpenters' and masons' rural 
gilds in the reign of Edward III. 2 Even the peasant 
labourers, according to Professor Thorold Rogers, 3 possessed 
these associations, which in all cases served many of the 
functions of the modern trade unions. Later on (1381) we 
shall come to a very remarkable instance of the power of 
these peasants' unions in the matter of Tyler's rebellion. 

§ 56. Life in the Towns of this time. 

The inhabitants of the towns were of all classes of society. 
There was the noble who held the castle, or the abbot and 
monks in the moDastery, with their retainers and personal 
dependants ; there were the busy merchants, active both in 
the management of their trade and of civic affairs ; and 
there were artisans and master workmen in different crafts. 
There were free tenants, or tenants in socage, including all 
the burgesses, or burgage-tenants, as they were called ; and 
there was the lower class of villeins, who, however, always 
tended to rise into free men as they were admitted into the 
gilds. To and fro went our forefathers in the quiet, quaint, 
narrow streets, or worked at some handicraft in their houses, 
or exposed- their goods round the market cross. And in 
those old streets and houses, in the town-mead and market- 
place, as a picturesque historian says, 4 amid the murmur of 
the mill beside the stream, and the notes of the bell that 
sounded its summons to the crowded assembly of the town- 
mote, in merchant-gild and craft-gild was growing up that 

1 Ashley, Econ. Hist. , II. ii. 82. It is also worth noting, as illustrating 
the close connection between the gilds and municipal life, that at Notting- 
ham the Town Hall is still called the "Guild Hall." 

2 This may be inferred from Rogers, ut supra, pp. 236 and 237. 

3 lb., p. 252. See also his Econ. Interpret, of History, p. 306, on Village 
Guilds. 

4 Green, History, i. 212. 



THE TOWNS AND THE GILDS 97 

sturdy industrial life, unheeded and unnoticed by knight or 
baron, that silently and surely was building up the slow- 
structure of England's wealth and freedom. This life was 
fostered by the idea of unity which possessed the townspeople 
of that day quite as much as it does those of our own time ; 
and this unity was promoted not only by the gilds but by 
the possession of town property in common by the towns- 
men, 1 in the shape of those common fields and pastures that 
were the relics of the time when the town was merely a 
village settlement. 2 Tn later times we find the townsmen 
undertaking common enterprises, such as the proper pro- 
vision of corn or water for the citizens. 3 The decay of 
municipal life, however, begins to date from the sixteenth 
century (or about that period), when commerce and trade 
were becoming more and more national and less local in 
character, and consequently national regulations of a more 
far-reaching character were required. But, long before 
municipal or even gild life began to decay, it had done a 
very important work. It had caused a radical change in 
social and political relationships, by its recognition of 
persons as standing for themselves and not tied to the land 
or depending on a superior lord. The association of persons 
as persons had taken the place of the feudal association 
which was based only on land. 4 Land was now no longer 
the basis of everything : a new social and economic force 
had appeared, and slowly but surely feudalism began to 
give way before it. 

1 Ashley, Econ. Hist., II. i. 36. 2 Above, p. 86, and cf. p. 48. 

3 More frequently in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Ashley, 
ut supra, p. 36. 

4 Cf. Maurer, Stadteverfassung, iii. 725. 



CHAPTER VII 

MANUFACTURES AND TRADE : ELEVENTH TO THIRTEENTH 
CENTURIES 

§ 57. Economic Effects of the Feudal System. 

We shall find that, for some time after the Norman Con- 
quest, English industry does not develope very rapidly, and 
that for obvious reasons. The feud that existed between 
Norman and Saxon — although, perhaps, partially allayed 
by Henry I.'s marriage to an English wife * — and the social 
disorder that accompanied this feeling, hardly tended to 
that quiet and security that are necessary for a healthy 
industrial life. The frightful disorders that occurred during 
the fierce struggle for the kingdom between Stephen of 
Blois and the Empress Maud, and the equally frightful 
ravages and extortions of their contending barons, must 
have been serious drawbacks to any progress. As the old 
annalist remarks — a They fought among themselves with 
deadly hatred ; they spoiled the fairest lands with fire and 
rapine ; in what had been the most fertile of counties they 
destroyed almost all the provision of bread." 2 But this ter- 
rible struggle fortunately ended in ruining many of the 
barons who took part in it, and in the desirable destruction 
of most of their abodes of plunder. The accession of 
Henry II. (1154) marks a period of amalgamation between 
Englishmen and Normans, not only in social life, but in 
commercial traffic and intercourse. 3 

But even when we come to look at the feudal system in 
a time of peace, we see that it did not tend to any great 
growth of industry. It certainly gave, under a strong 
ruler 4 (but only then) some security for person and pro- 

1 The reign of Henry I., however, was on the whole peaceful. " He was 
a good man, and great was the awe of him : he made peace for man and 
deer." — English Chron. (Bohn), 1135. 2 Quoted by Green, History, i. 155. 

3 Green, History, i. 161. 4 Cunningham, i. 131. 



MANUFACTURES AND TRADE 99 

perty, but it encouraged rather than diminished that spirit 
of isolation and self-sufficiency which was so marked a 
feature 1 of the earlier manors and townships. In these 
communities, again, little scope was afforded to individual 
enterprise, from the fact that the consent of the lord of a 
manor or town was often necessary for the most ordinary 
purposes of industrial life. 2 It is true, as we have seen, 
that when the noble owner was in pecuniary difficulties 
the towns profited thereby to obtain their charters ; and 
perhaps we may not find it altogether a matter for 
regret that the barons, through their internecine struggles, 
thus unwittingly helped on the industry of the land. It 
may be admitted also, that though the isolation of com- 
munities consequent upon the prevalent manorial system 
did not encourage trade and traffic between separate com- 
munities, it yet tended to diffuse a knowledge of domestic 
manufactures throughout the land generally, because each 
place had largely to provide for itself. 

The constant taxation, 3 however, entailed by the feudal 
system, in the shape of tallages, aids, and fines, both to king 
and nobles, made it difficult for the lower classes to accumu- 
late capital, more especially as in the civil wars they were 
constantly plundered of it openly. The upper classes merely 
squandered it in fighting. Agriculture suffered similarly, 
for the villeins, however well off, were bound to the land, 4 
especially in the earlier period soon after the Conquest, and 
before commutation of services for money rents became so 
common as it did subsequently ; nor could they leave their 
manor 5 without incurring a distinct loss, both of social status, 
and, what is more important, of the means of livelihood. 
The systems of constant services to the lord of the manor, 
and of the collective methods of cultivation, were also 
drawbacks to good agriculture. 6 Again, in trade, prices 

1 Rogers, Econ. Interp. History, p. 283. 

2 Cf. the Court Leet Records of Manchester (pub. 1884), and Pearson. 
Hist, of England, i. 594. 

3 On taxation, see Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. ch. xiii. pp. 576-586. 

4 On the other hand thin had its advantages as giving the agriculturist 
security of tenure (cf. Bracton, De Leg. , ch. viii. /. 24& ; Vol. I. p. 198-209 
(ed. Twiss). 

6 Excepton payment of a fine ; cf. p. 151, below. 6 Cunningham, i. 132. 



ioo INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

were settled by authority, competition was checked, 1 while 
merchants had to pay heavy duties to the king, and 
were very much at the mercy of the royal officials. 2 

§ 58. Foreign Trade. The Crusades. 

But, on the other hand, the Norman Conquest, which 
combined the Kingdom of England with the Duchy of 
Normandy in close political relations, gave abundant oppor- 
tunities for commerce, both with France and the Continent, 
and foreign trade certainly received a stimulus from this 
fact. It was further developed by the Crusades. The 
most obvious effect of these remarkable expeditions for a 
visionary success was the opening up of trade routes 
throughout Europe to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, 
and to the East in general. 3 They produced also a con- 
siderable redistribution of wealth in England itself, for the 
knights and nobles that set out for the Holy Land often 
mortgaged their lands and never redeemed them, or they 
perished, and their lands lapsed to the crown or to some mon- 
astery that took the place of a trustee for the absent owner. 4 

As to foreign trade, our chief authority at this time is 
the old chronicler, Henry of Huntingdon, whose history was 
published about 1155 A.D. 5 Like most historians, even of 
the present day, he says very little about so insignificant a 
matter as trade, but the single sentence which he devotes 
to it is probably of as great value as any other part of his 
book. From it we gather that our trade with Germany was 
extensive, and that we exported lead and tin among the 
metals ; 6 fish and meat and fat cattle (which seems to point 
to some improvement in our pastoral economy) ; and, most 
important of all, " most precious wool," though at that time 
the English could not weave it properly for themselves. Our 

1 Cunningham, i. p. 230. 2 Stubbs, Const. Hist., i. p. 522. 

3 The Crusades opened up routes rather than followed those already 
existing ; cf Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. lviii. 

4 Cf. Gibbon, ut supra. 

5 Quoted by Craik, Hist, of Brit. Commerce, i. 105. 

6 It appears from other authorities also that the export of these two 
metals must have been large. "The roofs of the principal churches, 
palaces, and castles in all parts of Europe are said to have been covered 
with English lead." Craik, ut supra, i. 105. 



MANUFACTURES AND TRADE 101 

imports, however, were very limited, comprising none of the 
necessaries of life, and few of its luxuries beyond silver and 
foreign furs. Other imports were fine woven cloths, used 
for the dresses of the nobility ; and, after the Crusades 
began, of rich Eastern stuffs and spices, which were in great 
demand, and commanded a high price. So, too, did iron, 
which was necessary for agricultural purposes, as Englishmen 
had not yet discovered their rich stores of this metal, but 
had to get it from Spain and the lands on the Baltic shore. 1 
Generally speaking, we may say that our imports consisted 
of articles of greater intrinsic value and scarcity than our 
exports, and thus were fewer in number, though there must 
have been some balance to be paid in coin or bullion. But 
this balance must have been comparatively small, as coined 
money, though, of course, no longer a rarity, was by no 
means plentiful, and was very precious. The German 
merchants certainly paid for English wool in silver. 2 

§ 59. The Trading Clauses in the Great Charter. 

One great proof of the existence of a fair amount of 
foreign trade is seen in the clauses which were inserted in 
the Great Charter (1215), by the influence of the trading 
class. One enactment secures to foreign merchants free- 
dom'of journeying and of trade throughout the realm, 3 and 
another orders an uniformity of weights and measures i 
to be enforced over the whole kingdom. The growth 
of town life is seen in the enactment which secures to the 
towns the enjoyment of their municipal privileges, their free- 
dom from arbitrary taxation, and the regulation of their 
own trade. 5 The amercement of a freeman, even upon con- 
viction of felony, was never to include his contenement ; 
nor his wares, if he were a merchant, nor his wainage if a 
villein. 6 The exaction of forced labour or of provisions and 

1 Rogers, Six Centuries, pp. 88 and 151. 

2 Henry of Huntingdon, ut supra. 

3 John had already promised this at the commencement of his reign. 
Maitland, Hist, of London, i. 73-75. It was again laid down in Clause 41 
of the Charter. 

4 Magna Carta, § 35. This had already been enjoined in an Assize of 
Richard I., and again by that King in 1194 (Hoveden, iii. 263 ; iv. 33). 

5 Magna Carta, § 13. 6 Magna Carta, § 20. 



i02 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

chattels without payment by the royal officers was also for- 
bidden, 1 and this must have been a great boon to the agricul- 
tural population. On the other hand, it is very noticeable 
that the royal officers are not to take money in lieu of 
military service from those who are willing to perform the 
service in person, 2 a regulation which shows that commutation 
for services, military and otherwise, was now very common. 
The general tone of those clauses of the Great Charter 
which deal with merchants, or with commerce and industry, 
is certainly remarkable in an age when, on the Continent 
of Europe at least, the merchant and his calling were 
generally despised by the " upper classes" ; and it is not a 
little to the credit of the English nobility of that day that 
they recognised the value of commerce and industry to the 
nation, and gave them special attention in the agreement 
which they forced upon King John. Their conduct showed 
both breadth and liberality, as compared with that of their 
Continental fellow -peers, who throughout Europe were 
accustomed to oppress and pillage the trader ; 3 nor is it 
the less creditable because it was actuated by a spirit 
of enlightened self-interest. The merchant class was now 
becoming a power in the land, and as such was worth 
recognising, even by the nobility ; and probably some indi- 
vidual merchants of influence took care that the interests 
of their class were not neglected in the Charter of the 
nation. 

1 Magna Carta, §§ 28, 30, 31, 23. These clauses raise the whole question 
of " purveyance," i.e., the prerogative enjoyed by the crown of buying up 
provisions and other necessaries for the use of the royal household at an 
appraised valuation, and even without the consent of the owner ; also of 
forcibly impressing the carriages and horses of a subject to do the King's 
business upon a public road on paying a fixed price. The abuses to 
which this prerogative gave rise were, of course, many and various, nor 
was the evil completely suppressed till the prerogative was formally re- 
signed by Charles II. The prerogative was extended to men's labour as 
well as their goods. Thus Edward III. granted a commission to William , 
of Walsingham to impress painters for the works at St Stephen's Chapel, 
Westminster, "to be at our wages as long as shall be necessary," and all 
such as refused were to be imprisoned by the Sheriff. Edward IV. granted 
a similar impressment of workers in gold for the royal household. Rymer, 
t. vi. 417; t. xi. 852; Hallam, MiddU r Ages, iii. 149; Taswell-Langmead, 
Const. Hist, p. 132. 

2 Magna Carta, § 29. 3 Taswell-Langmead, Const. Hist., p. 132. 



MANUFACTURES AND TRADE 103 

§ 60. The Jews in England. 

Among the mercantile community, moreover, there was 
a distinct class which also has special recognition in the 
Charter, for we find clauses 1 which endeavour to restrict 
usury as exacted by the Jews — a fact which, while point- 
ing to a not unfamiliar aspect of the Hebrew race, also 
shows their growing importance as an economic factor in 
mediaeval England. We will, therefore, briefly mention 
the facts concerning them at this period. 

The first appearance of the Jews in England may practi- 
cally be reckoned as occurring at the time of the Norman 
Conquest, for immediately after 106G they came in large 
numbers from Rouen, Caen, and other Norman towns. 2 
They stood in the peculiar position of being the personal 
property, or " chattels," of the King, 3 and a special officer 
governed their settlements in various towns. These settle- 
ments were called Jewries, of which those at London, Lin- 
coln, Bury St Edmunds, and Oxford were at one time fairly 
considerable. 4 They were protected by the King (for, being 
royal " chattels," no one dared interfere with them), and, of 
course, paid him for their protection. Their general financial 
skill was acknowledged by all, and William II. employed 
them to farm the revenues of vacant sees, while barons 
often employed them as stewards of their estates. They 
were also the leading, if not the only, capitalists of that 
time, 5 and must have assisted merchants considerably in 
their enterprises, though only upon a heavy commission. 8 
After the death of Henry I., the security which they had 
enjoyed was much weakened, in proportion as the royal 
power declined in the civil wars, and in the twelfth and 
thirteenth centuries they were in a precarious position. 
Stephen and Matilda openly robbed them, Henry II. (in 
1187) demanded one-fourth of their chattels, and Richard I. 

1 Magna Carta, §§ 10 and 11. 

2 Craik, Hist. British Commerce, i. p. 94 ; Bourne, Romance of Trade, 
p. 9. 

3 Cunningham, i. p. 145. 4 Romance of Trade, p. 10. 

5 Craik, British Commerce, i. 95. 

6 The rate seems to have been 40 per cent. Cf Ahglo-Jewish Exhibition 
Papers, 207. 



104 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

obtained large sums from them for his crusading extrava- 
gances. From 1144 to 1 189 riots directed against them 
became common, and the Jewries of many towns were 
pillaged. In 1194 Richard I. placed their commercial 
transactions more thoroughly under local officers of the 
crown. John exploited them to great advantage, and levied 
heavy tallages upon them, and Henry III. did very much 
the same. They were expelled 1 from the kingdom in 1290, 
and before this had greatly sunk from their previous position 
as the financiers of the crown to that of petty money-lenders 
to the poor at gross usury. What concerns us more im- 
mediately to notice in this early period of English history 
is their temporary usefulness as capitalists in trading trans- 
actions at a time when capital was not easily accumulated 
or kept in safety, and as a body from whom the crown 
could obtain money in times of need without appealing to the 
nation at large. Their expulsion seems to have been due 
to an outbreak of fanaticism of more than usual virulence. 

§ 61. Manufactures in this Period: Flemish. Weavers. 

We now turn from the subject of trade and finance to 
that of manufacturing industry. On doing so, we find that 
the chief industry is that of weaving coarse woollen cloth. 
An industry so necessary as this, and one, too, that can be 
carried on in a simple state of society with such ease as a 
domestic manufacture, would naturally always exist, even 
from the most uncivilised times. This, as we saw above, 2 
had been the case in England. But it is noticeable that, 
although Henry of Huntingdon mentions the export of " fine 

1 It appears that this expulsion of the Jews was not absolutely com- 
plete, and Jewish tradition gives the year 1358 as the date of final expul- 
sion ; but in 1410 a Jewish physician, Elias Sabot, was certainly allowed 
to practise in England. There seems to have been a certain immigra- 
tion of Jews to England when they were expelled from Spain by Ferdi- 
nand and Isabella (1492), for there are notices of them recovering debts in 
English law courts. Their presence in this country was, however, only 
first publicly sanctioned by Cromwell ; and during the Commonwealth and 
the reign of Charles II. they came back here in considerable numbers. Cf. 
Wolf's Anglo-Jewish Exhibition Papers, p. 57 ; and my own History of 
Commerce in Europe, p. 99 ; Craik, British Commerce, i. p. 129 ; Cunning- 
ham, Eng. Ind., i. pp. 266, 267. 

2 Pp. 6 and 8, above. 



MANUFACTURES AND TRADE 105 

wool" as one of the chief English exports, and although 
England had always been in a specially favourable position 
for growing wool, her manufacture of it had not developed 
to any great extent. Nevertheless it was practised as a 
domestic industry in every rural and urban community, 
and at this period already had its gilds — a sure sign of 
growth. Indeed, one of the oldest craft gilds was that 
of the London weavers, 1 of which we find mention in the 
time of Henry I. In this reign, too, we first hear of the 
arrival of Flemish immigrants in this country, who helped 
largely both then and subsequently in the development of 
the woollen manufacture. Some Flemings had come over 
indeed in the days of William the Norman, having been 
driven from Flanders by an incursion of the sea, and had 
settled at Carlisle. But Henry L, as we read in Higden's 
Chronicle, transferred them to Pembrokeshire in 1111 A.D. : 
" Flandrenses, tempore regis Henrici primi, ad occidentalem 
Walliae partem, apud Haverford, sunt translati." 2 Traces 
of them remained till a comparatively recent period, 3 and 
the names of the village of Fleming ston, and of the road 
called the Via Flandrica, running over the crest of the 
Precelly mountains, afford striking evidence of their settle- 
ment there, as also does the name Tucking Mill (i.e., cloth- 
making mill, from German and Flemish tuch, " a cloth "). 4 
Norfolk also had from early times been the seat of the 
woollen industry, and had had similar influxes of Flemish 
weavers. Their immigration does not, however, become im- 
portant till the reign of Edward III., when we shall find that 
English cloth manufacture begins to develop considerably. 5 
In this period, all we can say is that England was more 
famed for the wool that it grew than for the cloth which 
it manufactured therefrom, and it had yet to learn most 
of its improvements from lessons taught by foreigners. 
Indeed, some have gone so far as to state that weaving 
as a regular craft was first introduced into England by 

1 Cunningham, i. p. 181. 2 Higden, in Gale, Scriptores, Vol. III. p. 210. 

3 Of. Holinshed's Chronicle, 1107. 4 Taylor, Words and Places, p. 186. 

5 Burnley (Hist, of Wool and Woolcombing, p. 50) says the distinction 
between woollen and worsted industry cannot be traced with certainty 
before the Flemish immigration, though it probably existed in Saxon times. 



io6 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

foreigners at the time of the Norman Conquest, 1 and that 
the origin of craft gilds is to be found in the need for com- 
bination to protect each other that was felt by these foreign 
artisans when they first settled here. 2 But while certain 
points, in the history of weavers especially, tend to confirm 
this view, it seems unlikely that there were no gilds formed 
by Englishmen themselves prior to foreign settlement, 
although we may readily admit that it is largely to foreigners, 
and especially to the Flemish, that England owes its early 
progress in the making of cloth. It is noticeable also 
that Domesday Book gives evidence of a considerable 
number of artisans of French or other foreign extraction 
living in England at the time of the Conquest. 3 

§ 6 2. Economic Appearance of England in this Period. 
Population. 

The England of the Domesday Book was very different 
from anything which we can now conceive, nor did its 
industrial condition change much during the next century 
or two. The population was probably under 2,000,000 
in all; for we saw that in Domesday Book only 283,242 
able-bodied men are enumerated. These, multiplied by five, 
to include women and children, give 1,400,000 of general 
population, and allowing for omissions, we shall find two 
millions rather over than under the mark. 4 Nor, indeed, 
could the agricultural and industrial state of the country 
have supported more. 5 This population was chiefly located 
in the southern and eastern counties, 6 which were also 
politically and socially by far the most important, for the 
north of England, and especially Yorkshire, had been laid 
waste by the Conqueror in consequence of its revolt in 
1068. The whole country between York and the Tees 
was ravaged, and the famine which ensued is said to have 

1 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. 179, 180 (but cf. Ashley, Econ. 
ffist.,i. 83). 2 Ib. 

3 E.g., at Shrewsbury, Domesday, i. 252 a, 1, Gretford, i. 268 a, 1, 
Cambridge, i. 189 a, 1. 

4 A calculation three centuries later, based on the assessment for the poll- 
tax of 1377, gives 2^ millions (Topham, in Archceologia, vii. 337). 

5 Cf. Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 119. 

6 See the map in Freeman's Norman Conquest, iv. p. 101. 



MANUFACTURES AND TRADE 107 

carried off 100,000 victims. Indeed, for half a century 
the land " lay bare of cultivation and of men " for sixty 
miles northward of York, and for centuries more never fully 
recovered from this terrible visitation. 1 The Domesday Book 
records district after district and manor after manor in 
Yorkshire as " waste." 2 In the North-west of England, 
now the most densely populated part of the country, and in 
the East, all was fen, moorland, and forest, peopled only by 
wild animals and lawless men. 3 Till the seventeenth cen- 
tury, in fact, Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire 
were the poorest counties in England ; 4 and the fens of 
East Anglia were only reclaimed in 1634. The main ports 
were London for general trade ; 5 Southampton, for the 
French trade in wines ; Norwich, for the export wool trade 
with Flanders, and for imports from the Baltic ; and on 
the west coast Bristol, which had always been the centre 
for the western trade in Severn salmon and hides. 6 At 
one time, too, it was the great port for the trade of English 
slaves who were taken to Ireland, but William the Norman 
checked that traffic, 7 though it lingered till Henry II. 
conquered Ireland. For internal trade, market towns, or 
villages, as we should call them, were gradually springing 
up. They were nearly always held in demesne by the lord 
of the manor, who claimed the tolls, though in after years 
the town bought them of him. 8 Some of these markets 
had existed from Saxon times, as is seen by the prefix 
"Chipping" ( = chepinge, A.S. a market), as in Chipping 
Norton, Chippingham, and Chepstowe ; others date from a 
later period, and are known by the prefix " Market," as, e.g., 
Market Bosworth. 9 But these market towns were very 
small, and, indeed, only some half-dozen towns in the king- 
dom had a population above 5000 inhabitants. These 
were London (40,000), York and Bristol (12,000), Coventry 
and Plymouth (9000), while Norwich, Lincoln, Salisbury, 

1 Freeman, Norman Conquest, iv. 272. 2 lb., v. 42. 

3 Sim. Dun., Gest. Regg., 1079, p. 85, Hinde. 

4 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 127. 5 lb., pp. 122-124. 6 lb. 

7 Freeman, Norman Conquest, iv. 625. 

8 Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. xi. 408. 

9 Taylor, Words and Places, pp. 394, 395 (ed. 1864). 



108 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

Lynn, and Colchester had from 5000 to 7000 each. 1 But 
nevertheless the settlement made by the Norman Conquest had 
the effect of considerably strengthening the growth of towns, 2 
and we shall see more of their importance in the next period. 

§ 63. General Condition of the Period. 

Speaking generally for the whole period after the Con- 
quest, we may say that, though the economic condition of 
England was by no means unprosperous, industrial develop- 
ment was necessarily slow. The disputes between Stephen 
and Maud, and the civil wars of their partisans, the enor- 
mous drain upon the resources of the country caused by 
Richard I.'s expenses in carrying on crusades when he 
should have been ruling his kingdom, and the equally 
enormous taxes and bribes paid by the worthless John to 
the Papal See, could not fail seriously to check national 
industry. It is no wonder that in John's reign, at the 
beginning of the thirteenth century, we hear of great 
discontent throughout all the land, of much misery and 
poverty, especially in the towns, and of a general feeling 
of revolt. That miserable monarch was only saved from 
deposition by his opportune death. 

Yet with all these evils the economic condition of Eng- 
land, although depressed, was by no means absolutely 
unhealthy ; and the following reign (Henry III., 1216-72), 
with its comparative peace and leisure, afforded, as we shall 
see, sufficient opportunity to enable the people to regain a 
position of general opulence and prosperit}^ An important 
change was coming over the industrial history of England 
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for now we begin to 
see manufacturing and other industries arising side by side 
with agriculture as a new phenomenon, 3 and the manufac- 
turer and artisan was making himself felt as a newjpower 
by the side of baron and farmer. This time of quiet pro- 
gress and industrial growth forms a fitting occasion for the 
marking out of a new epoch. 

1 Ashley, Econ. Hist, II. i. p. 11. 

2 Freeman, Norman Conquest, v. 472. 

3 Ashley, Econ. Hist., II. ii., p. 99. 



PERIOD III 

FROM THE THIRTEENTH TO THE END OF THE 
FIFTEENTH CENTURY, INCLUDING THE 
GREAT PLAGUE 

(1216-1500) 



ryy 



CHAPTER VIII 

AGRICULTURE IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND 

§ 64. Introductory. Rise of a Wage-earning Glass. 

The long reign of Henry III., although occasionally troubled 
by internal dissensions among the barons, was, upon the 
whole, a prosperous and peaceful time for the people in 
general, and more especially for those whom historians are 
pleased to call the lower classes. For by this time a 
remarkable change had begun to affect the condition 
of the serfs or villeins, a change already alluded to, by 
which the villeins became free tenants, subject to a fixed 
money rent for their holdings. This rent was rapidly 
becoming a payment in money and not in labour, 1 for, as 
we saw, the lords of the manors were frequently in want of 
cash, and were ready to sell many of their privileges. The 
change was at first gradual, but by the time of the Great 
Plague (1348), money rents were becoming the rule raEher 
"than the exceptfdn"7"and though labour rents were not at 
all obsolete, it was an ill-advised attempt to insist upon 
them unduly that was the prime cause of Wat Tyler's 
insurrection (1381). Before the Plague, in fact, villeinage 
in the old sense was becoming almost extinct, and the 
peasants, both great and small, had achieved a large 
measure of freedom. The richer villeins had developed 
into small farmers, while the poorer villeins, and especially 
the cottars, had formed a separate class of agricultural 
labourers, not indeed entirely without land, but depending 
for their livelihood upon wages paid for helping to cultivate 
the land of others. The rise of this class, which lived by 
wages and not by tilling their own land, was due to the 

1 The entries in the Hundred Rolls show us that at the end of the thir- 
teenth century the process of substituting money payments for actual ser- 
vice had gone a long way ; Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. 218. 



112 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

fact that cottars and others, not having enough land 
of their own to occupy their whole time, were free to 
hire themselves to those who had a larger quantity. 
Especially would they become labourers at a fixed wage for 
the lord of a manor when he had commuted his rights to 
the unpaid services of all his tenants for a fixed money 
rent. Of course this change came gradually, but its effect 
is seen subsequently in the difficulties as to wages expressed 
in the Statutes of Labourers, difficulties which first became 
serious after the Great Plague. At the end of the thirteenth 
century we can trace three classes of tenants — (1) Those 
who had entirely commuted their services for a fixed 
money rent ; (2) those who gave services or paid money 
according as their lord preferred ; and (3) those who still 
paid entirely, or almost entirely, in services. 1 

§ 65. Agriculture the Chief Occupation of the People. 

Throughout the whole of this period the vast majority of 
the population were continuously engaged in agricultural 
pursuits, and this was rendered necessary owing to the very 
low rate of production consequent upon the primitive 
methods of agriculture. The production of corn was only 
about four, 2 or sometimes eight, bushels per acre, and this 
naturally had the effect of keeping down the population, at 
this time still only between 1,500,000 and 2,000,000. 3 
It is a remarkable fact that even the inhabitants of the 
towns used at harvest-time to go out into the country to 
get agricultural work, and people often migrated from one 
district to another for the same pnrpose, 4 just as Irish agri- 
cultural labourers of to-day are accustomed to cross over to 
England for the harvesting. Some attention was being paid 
to sheep farming, and noticeable progress in this branch of 
industry took place later. One order of monks in particular, 

1 See the Hundred Bolls ; Rot. Hund., ii. 636, ii. 324, and ii. 494. 

2 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 119. 

3 But cf. the discussion between Seebohm and Rogers in Fortnightly 
Review, II., III., IV., where Seebohm seems to think 5,000,000 possible in 
1346. 

* Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 63. 



AGRICULTURE IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND 113 

the Cistercians, 1 used to grow large quantities of wool ; and, 
indeed, England had almost a monopoly of the wool trade with 
Flanders (p. 120). But the great increase of sheep-farming 
occurs rather later, at the beginning of the sixteenth century. 2 

§66. Methods of Cultivation. The Capitalist Landlord 
and his Bailiff. The " Stock and Land " Lease. 

The agriculture of the early part of this period is de- 
scribed to us by various writers, of whom we may specially 
notice three — Walter de Henley, Robert Grossteste of 
Lincoln, and a third author whose name is unknown. The 
most noticeable of these is certainly Walter de Henley, whose 
treatise, called " La Bite de Hosbanderie" and written in 
French, is still preserved in many manuscripts. 3 There is 
little doubt that he wrote in the early part of the thir- 
teenth century, and his treatise remained the standard work 
on agriculture till the appearance of Fitzherbert's in 1523. 
The treatise by Grossteste of Lincoln is called Rentes Seynt 
Robert, and was written about 1240 A.D., for the guidance 
of the Countess of Lincoln in managing her estate and also 
her household. 4 It consists of twenty-eight practical 
maxims, but is more concerned with the household than 
the farm. The anonymous work, called Husbandry, 5 
seems to have been specially written for landowners, who at 
this period were beginning to take care that the accounts 
of their estates were presented to them in writing, and it 
lays down the proper methods of drawing up and present- 
ing the accounts, the receipts and outlay necessary on an 
estate, and the probable returns from both land and stock. 
It has a special interest, because it was in the reign of 
Henry III. that the system of keeping accurate agricultural 
accounts first came into vogue, 6 and it is owing to this fact 

1 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. 196 and 547. 
2 More's Utopia, p. 41. 

3 E.g., Oxford, Bodleian, Douce, 98 ; Merton, cccxi. ; British Museum, 
Add. 6159, and several others. 4 Pegge, Life of Grossteste, 95. 

5 Several MSS. exist; e.g., Merton, Oxford, cccxxi. ; British Museum, 
Add. 6159. 

6 Cunningham, English Industry, i. 272 ; Rogers, Six Centuries, 48. Of 
course it is on these accounts that Rogers' unique History of Agriculture 
and Prices is based. 

H 



ii4 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

that it has been possible to gain a very clear idea of the 
agricultural economy of England in the Middle Ages. 

If we look at a typical manor, we shall find that the 
arable land in it seems to have been divided fairly equally 
between the landlord and the manorial tenants, and before 
the Great Plague the landlord appears to have been not 
merely a rent-receiver, but a capitalist who cultivated his 
land by the aid of a bailiff, subject very often to his own 
personal supervision. Now, the business of a manor was 
very elaborate, and required a great deal of supervision, and 
we have an account of the various officers on a large estate 
given in a small work called Senescalcia. 1 We find three 
officers specially mentioned — the Seneschal, Bailiff, and 
" Praepositus." The seneschal was employed on large 
estates, consisting of many manors, to visit the manors in 
turn and see that the bailiff of each did his duty ; he there- 
fore had to know the details and customs of each estate, 
and what it ought to produce, in order that his lord might 
receive his full dues from it. The bailiff was the repre- 
sentative of the lord in single manors, and had the responsi- 
bility of cultivation of the soil of the demesne land and of 
agricultural operations generally ; while the " praepositus " 
was the chief man among the villeins, and shared the 
responsibility of cultivation with the bailiff, as representing 
the interests of the tenants. The bailiff had to keep 
accurate accounts to present to his lord or the seneschal, 
and it is from these accounts, which were kept with 
wonderful clearness, neatness, and accuracy, that we derive 
our knowledge of the agriculture of this period. 

Tenancies were, of course, of various kinds, as we have 
already seen (pp. 71, 75), but there is one which came into 
vogue about this time that specially deserves our attention. 
Jn many cases, especially on lands owned by monasteries, 
the land was held on the " stock and land lease " system, 2 
whereby the landlord let a certain quantity of stock with 
the land, for which the tenant, at the expiration of his 
lease, had to account either in money or kind. An instance 
of this kind of lease was the practice of the landlord letting 

1 Cunningham, i. 222. 2 Rogers, Hist. Agric. and Prices, i. 25. 



AGRICULTURE IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND 115 

cows to dairy farmers. 1 In mediaeval times the person to 
whom cows were leased for dairy purposes was the deye, 
i.e., dairyman or dairymaid. 2 The stock and land lease 
plan 8 was favourable to the tenant, for it supplied his 
preliminary want of capital, and if he was fortunate, allowed 
him often to make considerable profits, and even eventually 
to purchase an estate for himself. 

§ 67. The Tenant's Communal Land and Closes. 

It must always be remembered, however, that most of the 
arable land in a manor was " communal," i.e., each tenant 
held a certain number of furrows or strips in a common field, 
the separate divisions being merely marked by a piece of 
unploughed land, where the grass was allowed to grow. 
The ownership of these several strips was limited to certain 
months of the year, generally from Lady Day to Michaelmas, 
and for the remainder of the year the land was common 
pasture. This simple and rudimentary system was utterly 
unsuited to any advanced agriculture. The tenants, how- 
ever, also possessed " closes," some for corn, others for 
pasture and hay. The rent of a close was always highei 
than that of communal land, being eightpence instead of 
sixpence per acre, which seems to have been the usual 
annual charge. 4 Besides the communal arable land and 
his close, the husbandman also had access to two or three 
kinds of common of pasture — (1) a common close for oxen, 
kine, or other stock, pasture in which is stinted both for 
landlord and tenant ; (2) the open (" champaign " or 
" champion ") country, where the cattle go daily before the 
herdsmen ; (3) the lord's outwoods, moors, and heaths, 
where the tenants are stinted but the lord is not. 5 Thus 
the tenant had valuable pasture rights, besides the land he 
actually rented. But the system of holding arable land 
in strips must have been very cumbrous and have caused 
many disputes, since often a tenant would hold a short 
lease on one strip and a longer lease on another, or 

1 Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 330. 

2 The rent charged for cows was os. per annum. Rogers, Hist. Agric, 
i. 26. 3 For an example, see below, p. 18G. 

4 Rogers, Hist. Agric, iv. 96. 5 lb., iv. 93. 



n6 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

confusion of ownership would arise, while in many ways 
tenure was made insecure, and no encouragement was 
given to advanced agriculture. 

§ 68. Ploughing. 

As regards the cultivation of the land, it was generally 
ploughed three times a year. 1 Ordinary ploughing took 
place in the autumn, the second ploughing in April, the 
third at midsummer. The furrows were, according to 
Walter de Henley, a foot apart, and the plough was not to 
go more than two ringers deep. The ploughing and much 
other work was done by oxen, which are recommended both 
by Walter de Henley and by Fitzherbert as being cheaper 
than horses, and because they could also be used for food 
when dead. 2 The hoeing was undertaken by women, who 
also worked at harvest time in the fields. In Piers the 
Plowman's Creole (about 1394 a.d.) we have a description 
of a small farmer ploughing while his wife leads the oxen : 
" His wife walked by him with a long goad, in a cutted 
cote cutted full high." 3 

An average yield of something more than six bushels per 
acre is what Walter de Henley thinks necessary to secure 
profitable farming. 4 The chief crops seem to have been 
wheat, barley, and oats. 5 

§ 69. Stock, Pigs, and Poultry. 

As to stock, the amount kept was generally rather large, 
and the agriculturist of the thirteenth century was fully alive 
to the importance of keeping it, 6 since most of his profit 
came therefrom. Oxen, as we saw, were kept for the 
plough and draft, but not much stock was fatted for the 
table, especially as it could not be kept in the winter. 
There was no attempt to improve breeds of cattle, for the 
scarcity of winter food (winter roots being unknown till 
much later) 7 and the general want of means for resisting 

1 Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 270 n., and 329. 

2 Walter de Henley, quoted in Hist. Agric, i. 328; and Fitzherbert, 
quoted ib. , iv. 41. 

3 Line 433. 4 Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 270, note. 
5 lb., i. 26. 6 lb., i. 36, and 46-59, and p. 21. 7 lb., i. 52. 



AGRICULTURE IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND 117 

the severities of the winter helped to keep all breeds 
much upon the same level. 1 On the other hand, swine were 
kept in large numbers, 2 for every peasant had his pig in 
his sty, and, indeed, probably lived on salt pork most of the 
winter. Care was taken with the different breeds. 3 The 
whole of the parish swine were generally put in summer 
under the charge of one swineherd, who was paid both by 
the tenants and the lord of the manor. 4 The keeping of 
poultry, too, was at the time universal, so much so that 
they were very rarely bought by anyone, and, when sold, 
were almost absurdly cheap. 5 This habit of keeping fowls, 
ducks, and geese must have materially helped the peasant 
in ekeing out his wages, or in paying that portion of his 
rent which was paid in kind ; as, e.g., in the case of the 
Cuxham tenant (p. 75) who had to pay his lord six fowls 
in all during the year. Indeed, " poultry rents " were 
almost universal. 6 

§ 70. Sheep. 

This animal is so important in English agriculture that 
we must devote a special paragraph to it alone. For the 
sheep was, in the earlier periods of English industrial 
history, the mainstay of the British farmer, chiefly, of 
course, owing to the quantity of wool required for export. 
England had, up to a comparatively recent period, almost a 
monopoly of the raw wool trade, her only rival being Spain. 
There were, as mentioned before, a great number of breeds 
of sheep, and much care was taken to improve them. 7 
The fleece, however, was light, being only as an average 
about two lbs., according to Professor Rogers, 8 and the 
animal was small. The reason of this was that the attempts 
of the husbandman to improve his breeds were baffled by 

1 Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. p. 52. 2 lb., i. 335. 

3 Walter De Henley, quoted in Hist. Agric, i. 336. 

4 The same custom has been observed by the author in Swiss mountain 
villages, where a common goatherd takes care of the goats of the peasants, 
being paid so much per goat by each villager, and receiving also board and 
lodging for a night in turn from each. 

5 Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 339; iv. 58. 

6 lb., i. 339. 7 /&., i. 333. 8 lb., i. 53. 



n8 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

the hardships of the medieval winter, and by the preval- 
ence of disease, especially the rot and scab. 1 It is probable 
that the average loss on the flocks was 20 per cent, a year. 
They were generally kept under cover from November to 
April, and fed on coarse hay, wheat, and oat straw, or pea 
and vetch haulm ; 2 but no winter roots were available. 

§ 71. Increase of Sheep-farming. 

A great increase of sheep-farming took place after the 
Great Plague (1348), and this from two causes. 3 The 
rapid increase of woollen manufactures, promoted by Edward 
III., rendered wool-growing more profitable, while at the 
same time the scarcity of labour, occasioned by the ravages 
of the Black Death, and the consequently higher wages 
demanded, naturally attracted the farmer to an industry 
which was at once very profitable, and required but little 
paid labour. So, after the Plague, we find a tendency 
among large agriculturists to turn ploughed fields into 
permanent pasture, or, at any rate, to use the same land 
for pasture and for crops, instead of turning portions of the 
" waste " into arable land. Consequently, from the begin- 
ning of the fifteenth century we notice that the agricultural 
population decreases in proportion as sheep farming in- 
creases, and the steady change may be traced in numerous 
preventive statutes till we come to those of Henry VIII. about 
decayed towns, especially in the Midlands, the south, and the 
Isle of Wight. 4 The author of a political song of Henry VI. 's 
reign declared that our enemies sneered at English sheep- 
farming and thought it lessened our naval power. 5 Another 
cause that, in Henry VIII.'s time, had a distinct influence 
in promoting sheep-farming was probably the lack of capital 
which made itself felt, owing to the general impoverishment 
of England in his wasteful reign, and which naturally turned 

Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 31, 334. 

2 Walter de Henley, in Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 334. 

3 Cj. Cunningham, English Industry, i. 361. 

4 Cf. 6 Henry VIII., c. 6; 7 Henry VIII., c. 1 ; 27 Henry VIII., c. 22; 
and 32 Henry VIII., cc 18 and 19. 

5 From Ye Libelle of English* Policie, w. 36, 37. 



AGRICULTURE IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND 119 

farmers to an industry that required little capital, but gave 
quick returns. 1 We should also add as another cause the rise 
in prices caused by the discoveries of silver in the New World. 

§ 72. Consequent Increase of Enclosures. 

One consequence of this more extensive sheep-farming 
was the great increase in enclosures made by the landlords 
in the sixteenth century. 2 So great were these encroach- 
ments and enclosures in north-east Norfolk, that they led, 
in 1549, to a rebellion against the enclosing system, headed 
by Ket ; 3 but though more marked perhaps in Henry VIII. 's 
reign, the practice of sheep-farming had been growing 
steadily in the previous century. Fortescue, the Lord 
Chancellor of Henry VI. (about the middle of the fifteenth 
century), refers to its growth and the prosperity it caused 
in rural districts 4 — a prosperity, however, that must have 
been confined only to the great landowners. We receive 
other confirmation of this from various statutes designed 
to prevent the rural population from flowing into the 
towns, as, for example, the Acts of 1 and 9 Richard II. 
(1377 and 1385), of 17 Richard II. (1394), promoting 
the export of corn in hopes of making arable land more 
valuable. 5 Another Act was passed in 1489 (4 Henry 
VII., c. 16) to keep the rural population from the 
towns. In fact, it is very clear that at this time a 
great change was passing over English agriculture, and 
the old agricultural system was becoming seriously 
disorganised. But the growth of sheep-farming is also 
connected with a great economic and industrial develop- 
ment in England — the rise and progress of cloth manu- 
factures and of the weaving industry generally, and to this 
we must now devote our next chapter. 

1 Cf. Rogers, Six Centuries, 445. 

2 Rogers, Hist. Agric. , iv. 109 ; and Cunningham, Growth of Industry , 
i. 362. 

3 Rogers, Hist. Agric, iv. 124 ; Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. 428, 

4 Sir John Fortescue wrote a treatise called The Comodytes of England 
before 1451 ; and his works were edited by Lord Clement ; cf. i. 551. 

5 At the request of the Commons, Richard "granted licence to all his 
liege people of the realm of England to carry corn out of the same realm to 
what parts they please them, except to his enemies ;" 17 R. II., c. 7. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE WOOLLEN TRADE AND MANUFACTURES 

§ 73. England's Monopoly of Wool. 

The development of the woollen industry in England is 
interesting and important for two reasons. 1 On the one 
hand it shows us the origin of the peculiar wealth of our 
country both in the middle ages and later, and on the 
other it illustrates with great clearness the evolution of our 
industry generally, an evolution that begins with the rude 
efforts of prehistoric peoples, passes through the stages of 
family work and gild work in hand-made industry, till in 
more recent times it reaches the stage of the machine and 
the factory. It is also particularly associated with our own 
country, for in the middle ages England was the chief., 
wool-producing country in the North of Europe. Spain 
grew wool also, 2 but it could not be used alone for every 
kind of fabric, 3 and, besides, it was more difficult to trans- 
port wool from Spain to Flanders, the seat of the manufac- 
ture of that article, 4 than it was to send it across the 
narrow German Ocean, where swarms of light craft plied 
constantly between Flanders and the eastern ports of 
England. 5 Hence England had a practical monopoly of 
the wool trade. 6 which was due not only to its favourable 
climate and soil, but also to the fact that even at the worst 
periods of civil war — and they did not last for long — our 
island was incomparably more peaceful than the countries 
of Western Europe. From the thirteenth to the seventeenth 
century the farmers of Western Europe could not possibly 
have kept sheep, the most defenceless and tender of domestic 

1 Ashley, Early History of the English Woollen Industry, p. 1. 

2 Burnley, Wool and Woolcombing, p. 59. 

3 Bonwick, Romance of the Wool Trade, p. 346. 

4 Burnley, Wool and Woolcombing, p. 58. 

6 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 124. 6 Ashley, Woollen Industry, p. 35. 



WOOLLEN TRADE AND MANUFACTURES 121 

animals, amid the wars that were continually devastating 
their homesteads ; nor, as a matter of fact, did they do so. 1 
But in England, especially after the twelfth century, nearly 
everybody in the realm, from the king to the villein, was 
concerned in agriculture, and was interested therefore in 
maintaining peace. Even when the great landlords, after 
the Plague of 1348, gave up the cultivation of their arable 
land, they often undertook sheep-farming, and enclosed 
large tracts of land for that purpose. Hence the export 
trade in wool became more and more important, and there 
was always a continual demand for English wool to supply 
the busy looms of the great manufacturing towns in 
Flanders, Holland, 2 and even Florence 3 in Italy. 

§ 74. Wool and Politics. 

The most convincing proof of the importance of the 
wool trade is seen in England's diplomatic relations with 
Flanders, which, by the way, afford an interesting example 
of the necessity of taking economic factors into account in 
dealing with national history. Flanders was the great 
manufacturing country of Europe at that time. England 
supplied its raw material in vast quantities, and nine-tenths 
of English wool went to the looms of Bruges and Ghent. 
A stoppage of this export from England used to throw half 
the population of the Flemish towns out of work, and cause 
great misery. 4 The immense transactions that even then 
took place are seen from the fact that a single company of 
Florentine merchants would contract 5 with the Cistercian 
monks of England for the whole year's supply of the wool 
produced on their vast sheep-ranges on the Yorkshire 
moorlands ; for the Cistercian order were among the fore- 
most wool-growers in the country. 6 Now, it is a curious 
and significant fact that when Edward I., Edward III., and 
Henry V. premeditated an attack on France, they generally 
took care to gain the friendship of Flanders first, 7 so as to 

1 Rogers, Econ. Interp., p. 9. 

2 Burnley, Wool and Woolcombing, p. 60. 3 lb., p. 58. 
4 Ashley, James and Philip von Astevelde, 84, 91. 

6 Gf. Peruzzi, Commercio t Banchieri di Firenze, 70, 71. 

6 Burnley, Wool and Woolcombing, p. 61. 7 Rogers, Econ. Inter p., p. 8. 



122 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

use that country as a base from which to enter France, or 
at least as a useful ally ; and secondly, they paid a large 
proportion of the expenses of their French expeditions by 
means of a wool-tax in England. Thus, when Edward III. 
opened his campaign against France in 1340, he did so 
from Flanders, 1 with special help afforded by a Flemish 
alliance. This king also received annually £60,000 from 
the wool-tax alone, 2 and on special occasions even more. 
Again, it was a grant of 6s. 8d. on each sack of wool 
exported that enabled Edward I. in 1275 to fill his 
treasury for his subsequent invasion of Wales. 3 The same 
king in 1297 got the means for equipping an expedition 
against France, via Flanders, by the same means. 
Similarly Henry V. took care to cultivate the friendship of 
the Flemish and their rulers before setting out to gain the 
French crown, and paid for his expedition by raising taxes 
on wool and hides. 4 We may add to the notices here 
given the treaty of 1274 between Edward I. and the 
Countess of Flanders, protecting the export of English 
wool to Flanders, and the well-known case of Perkin 
Warbeck. This impostor was supported by the dowager 
Duchess of Burgundy, and was well received in Flanders, 
then ruled by the Archduke Philip. As Philip, at the 
instigation of the Duchess, encouraged Warbeck, Henry 
VII. took the step of banishing all Flemings from England 
(1493), and as Philip replied by expelling all the English 
from Flanders, commercial intercourse between the two 
countries was almost entirely suspended. The result was 
that, as Bacon tells us, 5 this interruption "began to pinch 
the merchants of both nations very sore," and they besought 
their respective sovereigns " to open the intercourse again." 
Philip withdrew his support from Warbeck, and the im- 
postor was left without resources, so that his subsequent 
appearance in England was a complete failure. The want 
of English wool thus altered the policy of the Flemish 
rulers, and before long the "great treaty," or Intercursus 

1 Green, Hist, of England, i. 411. 2 Rot. Pari, ii. 200. 

3 Stubbs, Const. Hist, ii. 192, 244. 4 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 304. 

5 Bacon's History of King Henry VII. (ed. by Lumby), p. 144, which 
see for full account of Warbeck. 



WOOLLEN TRADE AND MANUFACTURES 123 

Magnus, was made between the two nations (1496), by 
which trade was once more allowed to proceed unchecked, 
and " the English merchants came again to their mansion 
at Antwerp, where they were received with procession and 
great joy." 1 

Henry VII. also made a commercial treaty with Den- 
mark 2 (1490), and one with the Republic of Florence, 
securing to that city a stipulated supply of English wool 
every year. 8 The enormous revenues also, which from the 
thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries were exacted from 
England by the Papal Court, and by the Italian ecclesiastics 
quartered on English benefices, were transmitted in the 
shape of wool to Flanders, and sold by the Lombard 
exchangers, who transmitted the money thus realised to 
Italy. 4 Matthew Paris estimated the amount of ordinary 
papal taxation for the year 1245 at a sum of no less than 
60,000 marks. 5 The extent of these revenues may also be 
gathered from the fact that the Parliament of 1343, in a 
petition against Papal appointments to English ecclesiastical 
vacancies, asserted that " The Pope's revenue from Eng- 
land alone is larger than that of any Prince in Christen- 
dom." 6 And at this very time the deaneries of Lichfield, 
Salisbury, and York, and the archdeaconry of Canterbury, 
were all held by Italian dignitaries, while the Pope's collec- 
tor sent from London 20,000 marks a year to his master at 
Rome. 7 Now, these impositions were paid out of the pro- 
ceeds of English wool. It is interesting, too, to find that 
taxes for King Edward III. were calculated, not in money, 
but in sacks of wool. In one year (1338) the Parliament 
granted him 20,000 sacks ; 8 in another year (1340) 30,000 
sacks. 9 In 1339 the barons had granted him "the tenth 
sheaf, fleece, and lamb." 10 Early in the fifteenth century 

1 Bacon's History of King Henry VII. , p. 147. 

2 Rymer, Foedera, xii. 381. 3 lb., xii. 390. 

4 Cf. Cunningham, English Industry, i. 194, 271, 378 ; and Schanz, Engl, 
Handelspolitik, i. 111. 

5 Quoted by Cunningham, Growth of Eng. Industry (1 vol. ed. 1882), 
p. 146. 

6 Green, Hist, of English People, i. 408. 7 lb., p. 408. 

8 Foedera, ii. 1022, 1049, 1064. 9 Stubbs, Const. Hist., ii. 380. 

10 lb. 



124 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

£30,000 out of the £40,000 revenue from customs and 
taxes came from wool alone. 1 Once more, as in the days of 
the Crusades, we are able to see how the Hundred Years' 
War with France and the exactions of Rome were paid 
for by the industrial portion of the community, while under- 
neath the glamour of the victories of Edward III. and 
Henry V. lies the prosaic but powerful wool-sack. 

§ 75. Prices and Brands of English Wool. 

Having now seen the importance of wool as a factor in 
English industry and in political history, we must proceed to 
study more closely the facts of the woollen trade, and the 
manufacture of woollen cloth. The chief growers of wool 
were the Cistercian monks, 2 who owned huge flocks of 
sheep. The wool grown near Leominster, in Herefordshire, 
was the finest of all, and, generally speaking, that grown in 
Wiltshire, Essex, Sussex, Hampshire, Oxfordshire, Cam- 
bridge, and Warwickshire was the best. 3 The poorest came 
from the North of England and from the Southern downs. 
There were a number of different breeds of sheep, for care 
was taken to improve the breed, and it would seem that 
forty-four different brands of English wool, ranging in value 
from £13 to £2, 10s. the sack (of 364 lbs.) were recognised 
both in the home and foreign markets. 4 The average price 5 
of wool from 1260-1400 was 2s. lfd. per clove of 7 lbs., 
i.e., a little over threepence a pound, sometimes fourpence. 
In the middle of this period (1354) the average annual 
export, according to Misselden, 6 was about 32,000 sacks, 
which is equal to 11,648,000 lbs., representing a value of 
some £180,683 yearly. 7 At this time the export trade in 
wool between England and the Low Countries was not 
carried on by English merchants, but b} 7 foreigners, and 
chiefly those belonging to what was known as the " Hanse 
of London." 8 This was not the great Teutonic Hansa, but 

1 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 305. 

2 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. 547. 3 Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 383. 

4 Hot. Pari, 32 Hen. VI. 5 Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 366. 

6 Circle of Commerce, 119. 7 Cf. Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 367. 

8 Ashley, Woollen Industry, p. 38. Of course the Teutonic Hansa also 
was engaged in the wool trade. 



WOOLLEN TRADE AND MANUFACTURES 125 

was an association of merchants from the towns of Rheims, 
Amiens, and others in North France and Flanders, and 
even from Paris, who traded with England for English 
wool. 1 Merchants also came for wool from Cologne, and 
the men of Cologne had a house in London (distinct from 
the Teutonic Hansa's house) as early as 1157. 2 These 
merchants would supply the towns on the Rhine, for many 
of these cities had flourishing cloth manufactures. 3 

§ 76. English Manufactures. 

Now, although Flanders has been mentioned as the chief 
manufacturing centre for Europe, it must not be sup- 
posed that England could not manufacture any of the large 
quantity of wool which it grew. Undoubtedly the people 
of the Netherlands were at that time the great manufac- 
turers of the world, and were acquainted with arts and 
processes to which the English were strangers, while for a 
long time the English could not weave fine cloths : but, 
nevertheless, there was a considerable manufacturing in- 
dustry, chiefly of coarse cloths, 4 an industry very widely 
spread, and carried on in people's own cottages under the 
domestic 5 system. This industry was encouraged by the 
Government in occasional, but of course futile, regulations 
prohibiting the export of wool, in order that it might be 
used for home manufactures. 6 The chief kinds of cloth 
made were hempen, linen, and woollen coverings, such as 
would be used for sacks, dairy-cloths, woolpacks, sails of 
windmills, and similar purposes. 7 The great textile centres 
were Norfolk (Norwich) 8 and Suffolk, where, indeed, manu- 
facturing industries had existed long before the earliest 
records. An idea of their importance may be given from 
the fact that, in the assessment for the wool-tax of 1341, 

1 Ashley, Woollen Industry, p. 36. 

2 Lappenberg, Hans. Stalhof zu London, Uric. , 2. 

3 Ashley, Woollen Industry, p. 38. 

4 Of. Walter of Hemingburgh, Chronicon, i. 306 (Eng. Hist. Soc., 184S). 

5 Cunningham, i. 394. 

6 E.g., the Oxford Parliament of 1258 prohibited export of wool. Cf. 
Ashley, Woollen Industry, p. 39, and his Econ. Hist., II. ch. iii. p. 194. 

7 Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 568. 

8 Burnley, Wool and Woolcombing, 866. 



126 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

Norfolk was counted by far the wealthiest county in Eng- 
land after Middlesex (including London). 1 There was also 
a cloth industry of importance in the West of England, the 
chief centures being Westbury, Sherborne, and Salisbury. 2 
The linen of Aylsham were also celebrated. 3 That there 
was even some export of cloth as well as raw wool is clear 
from Misselden's statement, 4 that in 1354 A.D. there was 
exported 4774 J pieces of cloth, valued at 40s. each, and 
8061 pieces of worsted stuff, at 16s. 8d. each. 

§ 77. Foreign Manufacture of Fine Goods. 

But we find rich people used to purchase the fine cloths 
from abroad 5 — e.g., linen from Liege and Flanders gener- 
ally, and velvet and silk goods from Genoa and Venice — 
although there was certainly a silk industry in London, 
carried on chiefly by women, and protected by an Act of 
145 o. 6 Misselden 4 mentions the import of 1831 pieces 
of fine cloth, valued at no less than £6 each. But in the 
England of which we are now speaking, the textile in- 
dustries were prevented from attaining a full development 
from the fact that, though general, they were strictly local ; 
and, moreover, those who practised them did not look upon 
their handicraft as their sole means of livelihood, but even 
till the eighteenth century were generally engaged in agri- 
culture as well. The cause of this is connected with the 
isolation and self - sufficiency of separate communities, 
previously noted. An evidence of the consequent in- 
feriority of English to Flemish cloth is given by the fact 
that an Act of 1261 attempts to prohibit the import of 
spun stuff and the export of wool. Needless to say it was 
useless. The prices of cloth at this period are interesting, 
as showing the great difference between the fine {i.e., foreign) 
and coarse (home) cloths. The average price of linen is 4d. 
an ell, being as low as 2d., and as high as 8Jd. Inferior 
woollens sold at Is. 7Jd. a yard, "russet" at Is. 4d., 
blanketing at Is. On the other hand, scarlet cloth (foreign) 

1 Rogers, Six Centuries, 115, 116. 2 Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 570. 

3 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 105. 4 Misselden, Circle of Commerce, 119. 

5 Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 570. 6 33 Hen. VI., c. 5. 



WOOLLEN TRADE AND MANUFACTURES 127 

rises to the enormous price of 15s. a yard. Cloth for 
liveries varied from 2s. Id. to Is. per yard. Speaking 
generally for the period 1260-1400, we may give the 
average price of the best quality at 3s. 3jd. a yard from 
1260-1350, and 3s. 5|d. from 1350-1400; while cloth 
of the second quality fetched Is. 4|d. in the first period, 
and Is. ll^d. in the second. 1 

§ 78. Flemish Settlers teach the English Weavers. 
Norwich. 

It is to Edward III., very largely, that the developmeDt 
of English textile industry is due. It is true that, long 
before, Henry II. had endeavoured to stimulate English 
manufacture by establishing a " cloth fair " in the church- 
yard of St Bartholomew 2 at Smithfield. But English 
industry had developed slowly till the days of Edward, 
partly, no doubt, owing to the continual disorder of the 
preceding reigns. Stimulated, probably, by his wife 
Philippa's connection with Flanders, he encouraged Flemish 
weavers to settle in England, and also brought back home 
some Englishmen who had settled in Flanders and were 
apparently engaged in the cloth manufacture. Such, at 
any rate, appears to be the case from a perusal of an 
anonymous work dealing with this action of Edward III., 
and entitled The Golden Fleece. 8 The account runs thus — 

" The wools of England have ever been of great honour 
and reception abroad, as hath been sufficiently witnessed 
by the constant amity which, for many hundred years, hath 
been inviolably kept between the Kings of England and 
the Dukes of Burgundy, only for the benefit of the wool, 
whose subjects, receiving the English wool at 6d. a pound, 
returned it (through the manufacture of these industrious 
people) in cloth at 10s. a yard, to the great enriching of 
that state, both in revenue to their sovereign and in em- 

1 Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 568-593, and ii. 536-542. 

2 Ashley, Woollen Industry, 65 ; Bonwick, Romance of the Wool Trade, 
339. 

3 The extract is found in Burnley's History of Wool and Woolcombing, 
p. 61. The Golden Fleece was published anonymously in 1599, but treats 
of an earlier period also. 



128 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

ployment to their subjects, which occasioned the merchants 
of England to transport their whole families in no small 
numbers into Flanders, from whence they had a constant 
trade to most parts of the world. 

" And this intercourse and trade between England and 
Burgundy endured till King Edward III. made his mighty 
conquests over France and Scotland, when he projected 
how to enrich his people and to people his new conquered 
dominions ; and both these he designed to effect by means 
of his English commodity, wool ; all which he accomplished, 
though not without great difficulties and opposition ; for 
he was not only to bring back his own subjects home, who 
were and who had been long settled in those parts, with 
their whole families (many of which had not so certain 
habitations in England as in Flanders), but he was also to 
invite clothiers over to convert his wools into clothing (and 
these were the subjects of another prince), or else the 
stoppage of the stream would choke the mill, and then not 
only clothing would everywhere be lost, but the materials 
resting upon his English subjects' hands would soon ruin 
the whole gentry and yeomanry for want of vending their 
wools. Now, to show how King Edward smoothed these 
rough and uneven passages were too tedious for this short 
narrative, though otherwise in their contrivance they may 
be found to be ingenious, pleasing, and of great use." 

We may note also a statute 1 of the year 1337, which 
offers protection to all foreign clothworkers who may settle 
in England, and, at the same time, in order to encourage 
home manufactures, prohibits, on the one hand, the export 
of wool, and, on the other, the import of foreign cloth. 
After this date large numbers of foreigners seem to have 
come over here, 2 and complaints against them are frequently 
made by English cloth manufacturers. 3 But, although 
Englishmen naturally felt some jealousy of this foreign 
immigration, it resulted in lasting good to the industry and 
trade of our country, and undoubtedly increased our wealth 
very greatly. 

1 The 2 Ed. III., cc. 3, 4. 2 Ashley, Woollen Industry, 47. 

3 Madox, Firma Burgi, 284 w., col. 2. 



WOOLLEN TRADE AND MANUFACTURES 129 

The Flemish weavers settled chiefly in the eastern 
counties, though we hear of two Flemings from BrabaDt * 
settling in York in 1336 ; and shortly before this time one 
John Kemp, 2 also a Fleming, removed from Norwich, and 
founded in Westmoreland (1331) the manufacture of the 
famous " Kendal green." The chief centre, however, of 
the foreign weavers was naturally Norwich, 3 the Manchester 
of those days, with a population of some 6000, 4 and the 
chief industry was that of worsted cloths, so named from 
the place of manufacture, Worstead. When we speak of 
worsted cloths, we mean those plain, unpretending fabrics 
that probably never went beyond a plain weave or a four- 
shaft twill. The yarn was very largely spun on the rock 
or distaff, by means of a primitive whorl or spindle, while 
the loom was but a small improvement on that in which 
Penelope wove her famous web. 5 There was a great demand 
among religious orders for sayes and the like, of good 
quality ; plain worsteds were generally worn by the 
ordinary public. 

§ 79. The Worsted Industry. 

Whether the growth of the worsted cloth industry was 
connected or not with this particular Flemish immigration 
we cannot determine, but after the Flemings came it seems 
to have increased. 6 The manufacture was confirmed to the 
town of Worstead by a patent of 1315 ; 7 and in 1328, 

1 Rymer, Foedera, ii. 954. 2 lb., ii. 823. 

3 Bonwick, Romance of the Wool Trade, 366. 

4 Rogers, Six Centuries, 117. 

5 Compare two interesting pictures, one of weaving (about a.d. 1130-1174), 
from M.S. Trin. Coll. Camb., R. 17, 1 ; and the other of a loom from the 
Faroe Isles, from Montelius, Civilisation of Sweden, both reproduced in 
Green's History of the English People, illustrated edition, vol. I. pp. 171 
and 172. 

6 Burnley, Wool and Woolcombing, p. 50. 

7 Worsted is first mentioned in official records in the eighth year of 
Edward II. (1315), when the clothiers of Norwich are accused of making 
pieces of only 25 yards in length and selling them as being of 30 yards. 
But, of course, worsted as a material was known long before this period. 
William Rufus had a pair of stockings of " say," a kind of worsted, which 
were valued at 3s., a very high price for those days. See Burnley, ul 
supra, 51. 

I 



130 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

also, Edward III. issued a letter patent x on behalf of the 
cloth workers in worsted in the county of Norfolk. The 
manufacture was already so extensive and important that 
next year a special " aulnager " 2 (or cloth searcher) was 
appointed to inspect the worsted stuffs of Norwich and 
district, who held his office for twenty years. In 1348, 
however, on the petition of the worsted weavers and mer- 
chants themselves, the patent was revoked, and the aulnager 
removed. 3 But in 1410, after Norwich had gained a new 
charter (1403), the power of "aulnage" was once more 
given, at its own request, to its mayor and sheriffs, or their 
deputies. 4 

§ 80. Gilds in the Cloth Trade. 

In the previous period we referred to the origin and 
growth of the craft- gilds, and it is interesting to note their 
importance in connection with the woollen industry at this 
time. As a separate craft, that of the weaver cannot be 
traced back beyond the early part of the .twelfth, xentury y 
in the middle of the twelfth century, however, gilds of 
weavers are found established in several of the larger 
English towns. 5 At first they were in voluntary association, 
though acting independently of each other, but it became 
the policy of the government in the fourteenth century to 
extend the gild organisation over the whole country, and 
thus to bring craftsmen together in organised bodies. 6 
Elaborate regulations were drawn up for their governance 
by Parliament, or by municipalities. Now, in London at 
this date (about 1300), and probably at Norwich and other 
large towns, the woollen industry was divided into four or 
five branches — the weavers and burellers, the dyers and 
fullers, and the tailors (cissores). 7 The weavers and 
burellers were each in a separate gild, the dyers and fullers 
together in one, while the tailors formed a third gild of 

1 Col. Rot. Pat., 103, 2 Ed. III. 2 Col. Rot. Pat., 104. 

3 lb., 156, 22 Ed., III. 4 Rot. Pari., iii. 637. 

5 The Pipe Rolls of the early years of Henry II. show gilds of weavers 
in Winchester, Huntingdon, Nottingham, and York. Pipe Rolls, 2-4 
Hen. II., ed. 1844. 

6 Ashley, Woollen Industry, p. 17. 7 Ashley, ib., 27. 



WOOLLEN TRADE AND MANUFACTURES 131 

their own. But they were all very conscious that they had 
interests in common, and they were accustomed to act to- 
gether in matters affecting the industry as a whole, such as, 
e.g., ordering cloth made in the city to be dyed and fulled 
in that city, and not sent out to some other town. 1 

§ 81. The Dyeing of Cloth. 

The dyeing and fulling industry, however, could not have 
flourished much in England at this time, for English cloths 
were mostly sent to be fulled and dyed in the Netherlands ; 2 
and indeed we cannot consider dyeing as a really English 
industry till the days of James L, where it will be duly 
mentioned. At the same time it was not unknown, for it 
was practised even in early Celtic days ; 3 and we have 
scarlet, russet, and black cloths of English make in the 
fourteenth century. 4 Woad, also for dyeing, was imported 
in John's reign. 5 But the industry was chiefly carried 
on in the Netherlands, owing to the progress there made in 
the cultivation of madder, which forms the basis of so many 
different dyes. This p]ant has never been at any time 
largely cultivated in England, and, moreover, the Dutch for 
several centuries possessed the secret of a process of pul- 
verising the root in order to prepare it for use. Such 
being the case, there is no wonder that they far excelled the 
English in the art of dyeing. 6 

§ 82. The Great Transition in English Industry. 

From the time of this first Flemish immigration in the 
fourteenth century, we perceive the beginning of an im- 
portant modification in our home industries. Hitherto 
England had been almost exclusively a purely agricultural 
country, growing large quantities of wool, exporting it as 
raw material, and importing manufactured goods in ex- 
change. But from this period the export of wool gradually 

1 Liber Custumarum, 127-9 (of 1298 a.d.) 

2 Yeats, Technical History of Commerce, p. 147. 3 Page 14 above. 
4 Yeats, u. s. , p. 148. 

6 Madox, Hist. Exchequer, 531, 532 (in 12 John). Evidently the home 
supply of woad, the traditional dye of the ancient Briton, was insufficient. 
6 Yeats, Tech. Hist, p. 151. 



132 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

declines, while on the other hand our home manufactures 
increase, until at length they in turn are exported. Now, 
the beginnings of this export date from the fourteenths 
| century. 1 In fact, manufactured cloth, and not raw wool 
becomes the basis of our national wealth, and frequently 2 the 
export of wool is forbidden altogether, so that we may have 
the more for the looms at home. 

A proof of the growing importance of manufacture in this 
period is the noticeable lack of labourers and the high 
wages they get, as set forth in an Act of Henry IY. 
(1406), 3 which points to an increase of weavers in all parts 
of the kingdom, that takes labourers from other employ- 
ments. We may also incidentally note from this the 
growth of a distinct " labour class " living upon wages 
and not on the land. 4 

§ 83. The Manufacturing Class and Politics. 

The growing importance of the manufacturing and 
merchant classes which were now rapidly springing up 6 
can be clearly traced in the politics of the Tudor period. 
In spite of two great drawbacks, the cloth manufacture was 
progressing. It had naturally been severely checked for a 
generation or so by the awful national disaster of the Great 
Plague, which occurred so soon after Edward III. had 
helped to promote it in England, and which for the time 
utterly paralysed English industry in all its branches. It 
had been checked again by the long and useless wars which 
Edward III. and his successors carried on against France, 
at enormous cost and with no practical results, but which 
of course were paid for out of the proceeds of our national 
industries. But after these two checks it developed steadily, 
even during the Wars of the Roses ; for these wars were 
carried on almost exclusively by the barons and their 
retainers, in a series of battles hardly any of which were of 

1 Burnley, Wool and Woolcombing, p. 66. 

2 By the 4 Hen. VII., c. 11 ; 22 Hen. VIII., c. 2 ; 37 Hen. VIII., c. 15. 
3 7 Hen. IV., c. 17. 4 Ashley, Econ. Hist., vol. II. p. 101. 
5 We note now the growth of a class of merchants who were not manu- 
facturers, but occupied solely in buying and selling cloth. Ashley, 
Woollen Industry, pp. 58-67. 



WOOLLEN TRADE AND MANUFACTURES 133 

any magnitude, exaggerated though they have been both 
by contemporary and later historians. 1 These wars had 
the ultimate effect of causing the feudal aristocracy to 
destroy itself in a suicidal conflict, and thus helped to 
increase the influence of the middle class, i.e., the merchants 
and manufacturers, as a factor in political life. And thus 
it became the policy of the Tudor sovereigns, who were 
gifted with a certain amount of native shrewdness, to hasten 
the decaying power of the feudal lords by simultaneously 
supporting, and being supported by, the middle class, and 
to the alliance thus made between the crown and the 
industrial portion of the community we owe a rapid in- 
crease of commercial prosperity which laid the founda- 
tions of the greatness of the Elizabethan age, and of the 
great mercantile enterprises that succeeded it. 

1 Cf. Rogers, Six Centuries, 332-334. The Wars of the Roses seem to 
have had no effect upon wages and prices, even though there may have 
been some disorganisation ; cf. Cunningham, i. 402. 



\M 






u 



CHAPTER X 

THE TOWNS, INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES, AND FAIRS 

§ 84. The Chief Manufacturing Towns. 

During the period between the Norman Conquest and 
the middle of the thirteenth century, the towns, as we saw, 
had been gradually growing in importance, gaining fresh 
privileges, and becoming almost, in some cases quite, in- 
dependent of the lord or king, by the grant of a charter. 
Moreover, they had grown from the mere trading centres of 
ancient times into seats of specialised industries, regulated 
and organised by the craft-gilds. 1 This new feature of the 
industrial or manufacturing aspect of certain towns is well 
shown in a compilation, dated about 1250, and quoted by 
Professor Rogers in Six Centuries of Work and Wages, 2 
which gives a list of English towns and their chief products. 
Hardly any of the manufacturing towns mentioned are in 
the North of England, but mostly in the East and South. 

The following table gives the name of the town, and its 
manufacture or articles of sale : — 



TOWN. 


PRODUCT. 


TOWN. 


PRODUCT 


(1) Textile Manufactures. 


(2) Bakeries. 




Lincoln 


Scarlet cloth. 


Wycombe 


Fine bread. 


Bligh 


Blankets. 


Hungerford 


3) 


Beverley 


Burnet cloth. 


St Albans 


3? 


Colchester 


Russet cloth. 






Shaftesbury 
Lewes 


Linen fabrics. 


(3) Cutlery. 




Aylesbury 


5) 


Maxtead 


Knives. 


Warwick 


Cord. 


Wilton 


Needles. 


Bridport 


Cord and Hempen 
fabrics. 


Leicester 


Eazors. 



1 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. 309, &c. 

2 Six Centuries, p. 105. I have classified the list there given. 
134 



TOWNS, INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES, FAIRS 135 



TOWN. 

(4) Breweries. 

Banbury 

Hitchin 

Ely 



Brewing. 



(5) Markets. 

Ripon Horses. 

Nottingham Oxen. 

Gloucester Iron. 

Bristol Leather and Hides. 

Coventry Soap. 

Northampton Saddlery. 

Doncaster Horse-girths. 

Chester Skins and Furs. 
Shrewsbury „ 



TOWN. PRODUCT. 

Corfe Marble. 

Cornwall \ 
towns f 



Tin. 



(6) Fishing Towns. 

Grimsby Cod. 

Rye Whitinc 



Yarmouth 
Berwick 

(7) Ports. 

Norwich. 
Southampton. 

Dunwich 



Herrings. 
Salmon. 



Mills. 



This list is obviously incomplete, for it omits towns like 
Sheffield and Winchester, both of which were important as 
manufacturing towns from very early times, though the 
woollen manufactures of the latter were soon outstripped by 
those of Hull, York, Beverley, 1 Lincoln, Boston, 1 and espe- 
cially Norwich. 1 But such as it is the list is curious, chiefly 
as showing how manufactures have long since deserted their 
original abodes, and have been transferred to towns of quite 
recent origin. 

§ 85. Staple Towns and the Merchants. 

It will have been observed that by the time this list was 
compiled, most towns were either the seat of a certain 
manufacture or the market where such manufactures were 
chiefly sold. Now, in the days of Edward I. and Edward 
II. (1272-1327) several such towns were specially singled 
out and granted the privilege of selling a particular 
product, the staple of the district, and were hence called 
staple towns. But as the articles of commerce upon which 
customs were levied were wool, woolfells, and leather, these 
products are generally meant when speaking of staple 
goods. 2 The singling out of certain towns was adopted to 
facilitate the collection of the customs. 3 Besides a number 
of towns in England, staples were fixed at certain foreign 
ports for the sale of English goods. At one time Antwerp 4 

1 Cunningham, i. 181 n. 2 Craik, Hist, of British Commerce, i. 120. 
3 Cunningham, i. 287. 4 Craik, Hist. Brit. Commerce, i. 121. 



136 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

was selected as the staple town for our produce, at another 
time Bruges, 1 and afterwards St Omer. 2 A staple was also 
set up at Calais 3 when we took it (1347), but at the loss 
of that town in 1558 it was transferred to Bruges. 4 The 
staple system thus begun by the first two Edwards was 
altered and reorganised by Edward III. His first in- 
tention seems to have been to abolish the whole system 
of staples, at least abroad; and this he did 5 in 1328. 
But such freedom of trade was not maintained for long. 
After various alterations and changes, it was in 1353 finally 
decided (by the 27 Ed. III., st. 2, c. 1) to remove the 
staple from all or any foreign towns, and to hold it only 
in certain English towns. These were Newcastle, York, 
Lincoln, Norwich, Westminster, Canterbury, Chichester, 
Exeter, and Bristol in England ; Caermarthen for Wales ; 
and Dublin, Waterford, Drogheda, and Cork for Ireland. 
To compensate for the closing of foreign staples, every 
inducement was held out to foreign merchants to frequent 
the towns in England, though (with the exception of the 
years 1353-76) the staple at Calais was allowed to remain. 6 
Now, although regulations like these are opposed to our 
modern ideas of free competition, they were to a certain 
extent useful in the Middle Ages, because the existence of 
staple towns facilitated the collection of custom duties, and 
also secured in some degree the good quality of the wares 
made in, or exported from, a town. For special officers 
were appointed to mark them if of the proper quality and 
reject them if inferior. 7 

We might add that each staple was, of course, in accord- 
ance with the ideas of that time, subject to various regula- 
tions, and each staple town had a "mayor of the staple" 
distinct from the mayor of the town, though afterwards 
the two offices became united. 8 There was also an 
association of " merchants of the staple," who claimed to 

1 Rot. Pari., ii. 149 (5), 202 (13). 2 Rot. Hund., i. 406. 

3 " From the time of Richard II. till 1558 the staple was fixed at Calais." 
Cunningham, i. 372 n. 

4 Bonwick, Romance of Wool Trade, 172. 5 2 Ed. III., c. 9. 

6 Craik, Hist. Brit. Commerce, i. 123. 7 Cunningham, i. 258. 

8 Gross, Gild Merchant, i. 145. 



TOWNS, INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES, FAIRS 137 

date as a separate body from the time of Henry III. 1 Cer- 
tainly there seems to have been some sort of recognised 
body of English merchants trading with Flanders as early 
as 1313 A.D., for their "mayor" is mentioned then. 2 
Another association of some importance as a trading com- 
pany was The Company of Merchant Adventurers, incor- 
porated in 1407 3 as a kind of branch of the Mercer's Com- 
pany. They appear to have had depots in Exeter and 
Newcastle, besides their chief place in London, 4 and were 
engaged in the export of cloth as distinct from raw wool 
and woolfells, which, of course, formed the business of the 
Merchants of the Staple. 5 These associations are very inter- 
esting as forerunners of those great trading companies, which 
in later centuries did so much to promote our foreign 
trade. 

Now, these regulations of the staple, and the growth of 
these trading associations, show pretty clearly the growing 
importance of commerce in national affairs, and also the 
increasing prominence of merchants as a distinct and influ- 
ential class in the community. Their influence arose, of 
course, from their wealth, and was increased no doubt by 
the custom of those days, which recognised them as a class 
apart from the landowners, who were still, with the clergy, 
almost the only people who were supposed to count for any- 
thing in national life. So much were they a special class, 
that the sovereign always negotiated with them separately. 6 
Thus in 1339, when Edward III. was as usual fighting 
against France, and also, as usual, in great want of money, 
he was liberally supplied with loans by Sir William de la 
Pole, a rich merchant of Hull, who acted on behalf of him- 
self and many other merchants. 7 On one occasion he lent 
the King no less than £18,500, a most enormous sum for 
those days. Sir Richard Whittington performed similar 
services for Henry IV. and Henry V. 8 

1 Cunningham, i. 287. 2 Rymer, Foedera, ii. 102. 

3 lb., viii. 464. 4 Gross, Gild Merchant, i. 153. 

5 Rot. Pari., v. 64 (38), speaks of "their merchandises of wool and 
woolfell." 

6 Stubbs, Const. Hist., ii. 191, 192. 

7 Craik, Hist. Brit. Commerce, i. 172. 8 lb., i. 174. 



138 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

The family of Pole, as is well known, rose by their 
wealth to great rank and power, being created successively 
Earls, Marquises, and Dukes of Suffolk, and took an impor- 
tant place in the history of the nation. The rise of Pole 
and other great merchants to the ranks of the nobility 
marks a most noticeable social development in English 
history, for it shows how the peerage has been from almost 
the earliest times recruited from commerce, while in many 
other European countries it was impossible for anyone 
connected with trade to become one of the noblesse. By 
avoiding this irrational exclusiveness, our nation has to 
some extent also avoided the fatal evils which in other 
countries have befallen an aristocracy of a more rigid type. 

§ 86. Markets. 

Besides the staple towns, another class was formed by the 
country market towns, many of which exist in agricultural 
districts to-day in much the same fashion as they did six 
centuries ago. The control and regulation of the town 
market was at first in the hands of the lord of the manor, 1 
but by this period it had mostly been bought 2 by the 
corporation or by the merchant gild, or by both, and was 
now one of the most valued of municipal privileges. The 
market-place was always some large open space within the 
city walls, such as, for instance, exists very noticeably in 
Nottingham to this day. London had several such spaces, 
of which the names Cornhill, Cheapside, and the Poultry 
still remain. The capital was indeed a perpetual market, 
though of course provincial towns only held a market on 
one or two days of the week. It is curious to notice how 
these days have persisted to modern times. The Wednes- 
day and Saturday market of Oxford has existed for at least 
six centuries, 3 if not more, and so has that of Nottingham. 
The control of these markets was undertaken by the cor- 
poration for various purposes. 4 The first of these was to 

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist., i. p. 426, and Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 141. 

2 Stubbs, Const. Hist. , I. xi. p. 408 sqq. implies this. 

3 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 138. 

4 Ashley, Econ. Hist., II. i. p. 19; also see the Nottingham Borough 
Records, iii. 62. 



TOWNS, INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES, FAIRS 139 

prevent frauds and adulteration of goods, and for this 
purpose special officers were appointed, 1 as in the staple 
towns, or like the " aulnager " of Norwich mentioned 
before. This was possible in a time when industry was 
limited and the competitive idea was as yet unborn, and 
one cannot help thinking that it must have been of great 
use to purchasers, provided only that these officers were 
incorruptible, which was not always the case. The second 
object of the regulators of the market was to keep prices 
at a " natural level," and to regulate the cost of manufac- 
tured articles. The price of provisions in especial was a 
subject of much regulation, but our forefathers were not 
very successful in this point, laudable though their object 
was. The best example of such regulation is found, per- 
haps, in the Act 13 Rich. IL, st. 1, c. 8 (1389-90), 
which ordains — " Forasmuch as a man cannot put the price 
of corn and other victuals in certain," the justices of the 
peace shall every year make proclamation " by their 
discretion, according to the dearth of victuals, how much 
every mason, carpenter, tiler, and other craftsmen, work- 
men, and other labourers by the day shall take by the day, 
with meat and drink or without meat and drink, and that 
every man shall obey such proclamations from time to time, 
as a thing done by statute." Finally, provision is made 
for the correct keeping of the assize, or assessment from 
time to time, of the prices of bread and ale. The earliest 
notice of an " assize " in England is found in the Parliament 
Rolls for 1203, 2 but the practice is probably much older, 
and the most ancient law upon the subject is the 51st Hen. 
III. (a.d. 1266), the "Assisa Panis et Cerevisise." The 
assize of bread was in force till the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century, and was only then abolished in London. 3 

The " assize " arranged by statute was, of course, a 
national matter, but many local regulations were in force. 

1 Gilds usually seem to have appointed their own officers, except the gilds 
of those who were engaged in providing food and drink. In these cases 
the officers (such as "ale conners " and "flesh conners ") were appointed by 
the borough authorities. Of. Ashley, Econ. Hist., II. i. p. 30. 

2 5 John ; cf. Craik, Hist. Brit. Commerce, i. 137. 

3 lb., p. 137. 



140 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

Strict laws were also made 1 against the practices of fore- 
stalling, engrossing, or regrating of provisions, i.e., buying 
them in such quantities or at such times as to control a 
future market ; for there seems to have been an idea — not 
perhaps altogether irrational — in the minds of our ancestors 
that it was something unseemly to manipulate the market 
in the case of commodities of such universal consumption 
as articles of food. Nor were the laws against these 
practices finally removed from the Statute Book till towards 
the end of the eighteenth century. 2 

§ 87. The Great Fairs. 

Now, besides the weekly markets there were held annually 
in various parts of the kingdom large fairs, which often 
lasted many days, and which form a most important and 
interesting economic feature of the time. They were 
necessary for several reasons, since the ordinary trader 
could not and did not exist in the small villages, in which 
it must be remembered most of the population lived, nor 
could he even find sufficient customers in a town of that 
time, for very few contained over 5000 inhabitants; and 
because the inhabitants of the villages and towns could find 
in the fairs a wider market for their goods, and more 
variety for their purchases. Moreover, as has been well 
remarked, 3 since the stream of commerce was too weak in 
those days to penetrate constantly to all parts of the country, 
this occasional concentration of trade in fairs was distinctly 
advantageous for industry. The result was that these fairs 
were frequented by all classes of the population, from the 
noble and prelate to the villein, 4 and hardly a family in 
England did not at one time of the year or another send a 
representative, or at least give a commission to a friend, to 
get goods at some celebrated fair. They afforded an oppor- 
tunity for commercial intercourse between inhabitants of 
all parts of England, and with traders from all parts of 

1 Of. the Statute De Pistoribus, of 51 Hen. III. (or perhaps 13 Ed. I.) 
till the 5 and 6 Ed. VI., c. 14 and 15. 

2 12 Geo. III., c. 71. 3 W. Roscher, Engl. Volhswirthschaftlehre, 133. 
4 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 148. 



TOWNS, INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES, FAIRS 141 

Europe. They were, moreover, a necessity arising from the 
economic conditions of a time when transit of goods was 
comparatively slow, and when ordinary people disliked 
travelling frequently or far beyond the limits of their own 
district. The spirit of isolation which is so marked a 
feature of the mediaeval town or village 1 encouraged this 
feeling, and except the trading class few people travelled 
about, and those who did so were regarded with suspicion. 
Till the epoch of modern railways, in fact, fairs were a 
necessity, though now the rapidity of locomotion and the 
facility with which goods can be ordered and despatched, 
have annihilated their utility and rendered their relics a nuis- 
ance. But even in the present day there are plenty of people 
to be found in rural districts who have rarely, and some- 
times never, been a dozen miles from their native village. 
As late as the eighteenth century several fairs of great 
importance were still in full vigour, as we may see from a 
list given by that ingenious compiler, Malachy Postle- 
thwaite. 2 He mentions — " (1) Stourbridge Fair near Cam- 
bridge, beyond all comparison the greatest in Britain, per- 
haps in the world ; (2) Bristol, two fairs, very near as great 
as that of Stourbridge ; (3) Exeter ; (4) West Chester ; (5) 
Edinburgh ; also several marts, as : Lynn, Boston, Beverley, 
Gainsborough, Howden, &c. ; (6) Weyhill Fair, and (7) 
Burford Fair, for sheep ; (8) Pancrass Fair in Staffordshire, 
for saddle horses ; (9) Bartholomew Fair in London, for lean 
and Welsh black cattle ; (10) St Faith's in Norfolk, for Scots 
runts; (11) Yarmouth fishing fair for herrings, the only 
fishing fair in Great Britain, or that I have heard of in the 
world, except the fishing for pearl oysters near Ceylon in 
the West Indies; (12) Ipswich butter fair; (13) Wood- 
borough Hill near Blandford in Dorset, famous for West 
country manufactures, Devonshire kersies, Wiltshire druggets, 
&c. ; (14) two cheese fairs at Atherstone and Chipping 
Norton ; with innumerable other fairs, besides weekly 
markets for all sorts of goods, as well our own as of foreign 
growth." 

1 Rogers. Econ. Inte.rp., p. 283. 

2 Postlethwaite, Diet, of Trade and Commtrce (ed. 177-4), s. v. Fair. 



142 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

§ 88. The Fairs of Winchester and Stourbridge. 

Fairs were held in every part of the country at various 
times of the year. Thus there was a fair at Leeds, 1 which 
for several centuries served as a centre where the wool- 
growers of Yorkshire and Lancashire met English and 
foreign merchants from Hull and other eastern ports, and 
sold them the raw material that was to be worked up in 
the looms of Flanders. But there were a few great fairs 
that eclipsed all others in magnitude and importance, and 
of these two deserve special mention, those at Winchester 
and Stourbridge. (1.) That at Winchester was founded in 
the reign of William E-ufus, who granted the Bishop of 
Winchester leave to hold a fair on St Giles' Hill for one 
day in the year. 2 Henry II., however, granted a charter 
for a fair of sixteen days. It was mainly, though by no 
means entirely, for wool a,nd woollen goods. During this 
time the great common was covered with booths and tents, 
and divided into streets called after the name of the goods 
sold therein, as, e.g., (i The Drapery," " The Pottery," " The 
Spicery." Tolls were levied on every bridge and roadway 
to the fair, and brought in a large revenue to the Bishop. 
The fair was of importance till the fourteenth century, for 
in the Vision of Peres the Plowman, Covetousness tells 
how 

" To Wye 3 and to Winchester I went to the fair." 4 

But it declined from the time of Edward III., chiefly 
owing to the fact that the woollen trade of Norwich and 
other eastern towns had become far more important, while 
on the other hand Southampton was found to be a more 
convenient spot for the Venetian 5 traders' fleet to do business. 
(2.) Stourbridge Fair. — But the greatest of all English 
fairs, and that which kept its reputation and importance 

1 Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 62. 

2 Kitchin, Winchester (Historic Towns), pp. 63, 161, and Ashley, Econ. 
Hist., I. ii. p. 100. 

3 Probably Weyhill in Hampshire. 

4 For a very full account of the Fair see Warton's long note on this line 
in his History of English Poetry, § viii. 

5 Below, p. 225. 



TOWNS, INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES, FAIRS 143 

the longest, was the Fair of Stourbridge, near Cambridge. 1 
It was of European renown, and lasted three weeks, being 
opened on the 18th of September. 2 Its importance was 
due to the fact that it was within easy reach of the ports 
of the east coast, such as Lynn, Colchester, and Blakeney, 
which at that time were very accessible and much fre- 
quented. 3 Hither came the Venetian and Genoese merchants, 
with stores of Eastern produce — silks and velvets, cotton, 
and precious stones. The Flemish merchants brought 
the fine linens and cloths of Bruges, Liege, Ghent, and 
other manufacturing towns. Frenchmen and Spaniards 
were present with their wines ; Norwegian sailors with tar 
and pitch ; and the mighty traders of the Hansa towns ex- 
posed for sale furs and amber for the rich, iron and copper 
for the farmers, and flax for the housewives, while homely 
fustian, buckram, wax, herrings, and canvas mingled in- 
congruously in their booths with strange far-off Eastern 
spices and ornaments. And in return the English farmers 
— or traders on their behalf — carried to the fair hundreds 
of huge wool-sacks, wherewith to clothe the nations of 
Europe, or barley for the Flemish breweries, with corn 
and horses and cattle also. Lead was brought from the 
mines of Derbyshire, and tin from Cornwall ; even some 
iron from Sussex, but this was accounted inferior to the 
imported metal. All these wares were, as at Winchester, 
exposed in stalls and tents in long streets, some named 
after the various nations that congregated there, and others 
after the kind of goods on sale. This vast fair lasted down 
to the eighteenth century in unabated vigour, and was at 
that time described by Daniel Defoe, in a work now easily 
accessible to all, 4 which contains a most interesting descrip- 

1 This Stourbridge or Sturbridge is now almost in Cambridge itself, the 
relics of the fair being held in a field near Barnwell, about a mile and a 
half from the city. Id ancient times it was very easy for merchants to 
come up the river Ouse in barges or light boats, as water-transport was 
much more used then than now, and even the sea-going ships were very 
light craft. Probably a Flemish merchant would find no difficulty in sail- 
ing all the way from Antwerp to Cambridge in a light ship. 

2 The description which follows is based on Rogers, Hist. Agric, 
i. 141-143. 3 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 124. 

4 In his Tour through the Eastern Counties (1722) ; Tour, i. 91, or p. 164 
in CasselPs National Library Edition. 



144 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

tion of all the proceedings of this busy month. It is not 
much more than a hundred years ago that the Lancashire 
merchants alone used to send their goods to Stourbridge 
upon a thousand pack horses, 1 but now the pack-horses and 
fairs have gone and the telegraph and railway have taken 
their place. 

§ 89. English Mediwval Ports. 

In the last paragraph mention was made of the east coast 
having ports of great prominence in this period. It will be 
convenient here to notice what were the chief ports of Eng- 
land, and to remark how few of them have retained their 
old importance. The chief port was of course London, 
which has always held an exceptional position, and the 
other principal ports were on the east and south coast. 2 
Southampton was from early times the chief southern har- 
bour, and next to it Dartmouth, Plymouth, Sandwich, and 
Winchelsea, Weymouth, Shoreham, Dover, and Margate. 
They were connected with the trade in French and Spanish 
goods. On the western coast Bristol was almost the only 
port much frequented, being the centre and harbour for 
the western fisheries, and also a place of export for hides 
and the cloth manufactures of the western towns. In the 
fifteenth century Bristol fishermen penetrated through the 
Hebrides to the Shetland and Orkney Islands and to the 
northern fisheries, where they found that the Scarborough 
men had preceded them. 3 On the eastern coast, indeed, 
Scarborough was one of the most enterprising ports. 4 Boston, 
Hull, Lynn, Harwich, Yarmouth, and Colchester were also 
very flourishing, and were concerned in the Flemish and 
Baltic trade. 5 Further north Newcastle was the centre for 
the coasting trade in coal, 6 and Berwick was a fisherman's 
harbour. But the southern and eastern ports were the 
most frequented, as being suitable to the light and shallow 

1 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 55. 

2 Cf. Cunningham, i. 258 ; Rogers, Six Centuries, 122. 

3 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 124. 

4 For the making of a pier there, cf. Statute 37 Hen. VIII., c. 14. 

5 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 124. 6 lb. 



TOWNS, INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES, FAIRS 145 

craft that did a coasting trade, or ran across to the Con- 
tinent in smooth weather. 

The extent of piracy was, however, a great drawback to 
the prosecution of trade by sea, and formed a danger which 
in these days we can only inadequately realise. 1 Organised 
bands of pirates, called the " Rovers of the Sea," ravaged 
our coasts in the reign of Henry VI. 2 It was quite a com- 
mon occurrence for Scarborough to be attacked by Scotch, 
French, and Flemish pirates 3 ; and even large towns like 
London and Norwich made plans of defence against possible 
attacks from such enemies. 4 Merchant vessels had to sail 
together in fleets for the sake of security ; both Henry IV. 
and Henry VI. empowered merchants in the coast towns 
to organise defensive schemes 5 ; and the protection of mer- 
chant shipping also occupied the attention of Henry VTIL 6 
In fact, for many centuries piracy was the curse of our 
maritime trade. 

§ 9 0. The Temporary Decay of Manufacturing Towns. 

We have now noticed the chief markets, fairs, ports, and 
manufacturing towns of mediaeval England, and it will be 
seen that commercial prosperity was certainly developing. 
So, too, were home manufacturing industries, but their 
growth brought about a curious effect in the decay of certain 
towns, and the rise of industrial villages in rural districts. 
To the decay of towns we find frequent reference in the 
Statutes of Henry VI., Henry VII., and his successor, i.e., 
from 1490 or 1500 onwards. This decay was due to 
several causes, among others to the heavy taxation caused 
by wars with France, 7 to the growth of sheep-farming 
mentioned above, and also to the fact that the industrial 
disabilities imposed upon dwellers in towns, in consequence 

1 Of. The Paston Letters, i. 114. 

2 Rot. Pari., iv. 350 (42), 376 (29). 3 Rot. Pari, iii. 162 (46). 

4 Denton, Fifteenth Century, pp. 87, 89. 

5 Rymer, Foedera, viii. 438, 439, 455. 6 lb., xiii. 326. 

7 In 1433 Parliament in voting a tenth and fifteenth had to remit £4000 
to poor towns, among which Yarmouth and Lincoln are noted. Rot. Pari. , 
iv. 425. Cf. also R. P., v. 5 and v. 37 for other remissions. For other 
evidences of decay see Rot. Pari. , vi. 390, 438, and 514 ; Statutes 27 Hen. 
VIII., c. 1 ; 32 Hen. VIII., c. 18, and others. 

K 



146 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

of the corporate privileges of the gilds, now far exceeded the 
advantages of residence there. The days of usefulness for 
the gilds had gone past ; their restrictions, especially as to 
apprentices and journeymen, 1 were now felt only to cramp 
the rising manufacturing industries. Hence we find the 
manufacturers of the Tudor period were leaving the towns 
and seeking open villages instead, where they could develope 
their trade free from the vexatious restrictions of old- 
fashioned corporations. Of course laws were passed to 
check this tendency, and to confine particular industries to 
particular towns. Thus, in Norfolk, no one was to " dye, 
shear, or calendar cloth " anywhere but in the town of Nor- 
wich 2 ; no one in the northern counties was to make 
"worsted coverlets" except in York. 3 

§91. Growth of Industrial Villages. The Germs of the 
Modern Factory System. 

Such protective enactments were, however, as protective 
enactments must generally be, utterly in vain. Henry VII. 
tried 4 to remedy the supposed evil by limiting the privi- 
leges of interference of the gilds in causing their ordin- 
ances to be first approved by the Chancellor or Justices ; 
but even this step was useless. Manufactures were slowly 
and surely transferred to country villages, 5 and in several 
industries a kind of modern factory system can be traced 
at this time. Master manufacturers, weary of municipal 
and gild-made restrictions, organised in country places little 
communities solely for industrial purposes, and so arranged 
as to afford greater scope for the combination and division 
of labour. 6 The system of apprenticeship was a powerful 
element in this scheme, and supplied ready labour for these 
small factories. The goods were made not as formerly only 

1 Of. Statute 28 Hen. VIII., c. 5. 

2 Cf. the 5 Hen. VIII., c. 4; 14 and 15 Hen. VIII., c. 3 ; and 26 Hen. 
VIII., c. 16. 

3 34 and 35 Hen. VIII., c. 10. 4 19 Hen. VII., c. 7. 

5 Mrs Green, Town Life, ii. 88, says that this removal was in search of 
water-power {e.g., in Yorkshire and Gloucestershire). But a more power- 
ful reason was the tyranny of the gilds ; Gross, Gild Merchant, i. 52. 

6 Of Ashley, Woollen Industry, p. 75, and Gross, u. s, 



TOWNS, INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES, FAIRS 147 

for local use, but for the purposes of trade and profit 
throughout the kingdom. The master was bound to his 
workmen rather more closely than the mill-owner of the 
present day to his " hands," for the spirit of personal 
sympathy and obligation still survived in these small labour 
communities, nor was there any wide social gulf fixed between 
master and man. 1 But the germs of the modern system 
were there; for this new system was not that of mere 
cottage industry, as had been the rule in previous periods, 
but a system of congregated labour organised upon a 
capitalistic basis by one man — the organiser, head, and 
owner of the industrial village — the master clothier. 

It is, perhaps, interesting to note in this place the 
exemplification of the four systems or stages through which 
manufacturing industry usually passes. 2 They may be 
called — (1) The family system, under which each worker 
produces separately, aided only by his wife and children ; 
(2) the system of production under the supervision and 
arrangements of gilds, as we have already seen, and 
where small " masters " employ a few men to work with 
them as journeymen and apprentices, while they as manu- 
facturers sell their own goods to the public ; (3) the 
domestic system, which is much the same as the one 
previous, except that the master manufacturer is no longer 
a merchant to the public, 3 but simply produces, on a large 
scale, for purchase by dealers ; and lastly (4) we have the 
factory system of modern times, which is familiar to all. 
Now the growth of the domestic system and of the great 
master clothiers may be dated from the middle of the 
fourteenth century, 4 and it extended through the fifteenth to 
the eighteenth century. 5 We see now clothiers in a large 
way of business who buy the wool, cause it to be spun, 
dyed, and finished, and then sell it to drapers or merchants, 
who retail it to the public. 6 The great sheep farmers were 
often clothiers, and made up into cloth the wool they grew. 7 

Among these famous " master clothiers " we read of men like 

1 Cf. Ashley, Woollen Industry, p. 74. 

2 Cf. Held, Zur socialen Geschichte Englands, 541 sq. 

3 Ashley, Woollen Industry, p. 73. 4 lb., 81. 
* lb., 73. « /6, t 81, 7 j 0% , 80. 



148 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

John Winch combe, or " Jack of Newbury/' as he was called, 
of whom it is recorded that a hundred looms always worked 
in his house, 1 and who was rich enough to send a hundred of 
his journeymen to Flodden Field in 1513. 2 His kerseys 
were famous all over Europe. 3 It was from communities 
such as these that the villages of Manchester, Bolton, Leeds, 
Halifax, and Bury took their rise, and afterwards developed 
into the great factory towns of to-day. But these work- 
shops, large though they seemed then, were utterly insig- 
nificant compared with the huge factories of modern times, 
where the workmen are numbered in thousands, and are to 
the capitalist-employer, or joint-stock company that owns 
the mill, merely a mass of human machines, more intelli- 
gent though not so durable as other machines, and possessed 
of an unpleasant tendency to go out " on strike," for reasons 
that usually appear to their employer insufficient and sub- 
versive of the whole industrial system. However, the in- 
dustrial system is not subverted, though the workmen can 
hardly be said to be upon the same pleasant footing with 
their employers as they used to be in the old industrial 
village. But even in those days things did not always go 
smoothly, and there are traces 4 of the existence of a very 
badly paid class of workmen in manufacturing towns. 

1 Burnley, Wool and Woolcombing, p. 69. In 1549 the English envoy at 
Antwerp advises the Protector, Somerset, to send to Antwerp for sale a 
thousand pieces of " Winchcombe's kersies." 

2 BischofF, Woollen and Worsted Manufacture, i. 55. 

3 Burnley, ut supra, p. 69. 

4 Mrs Green, Town Life, ii. 101. The wages were only one penny a day, 
which was low even for those times. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE GREAT PLAGUE AND ITS ECONOMIC EFFECTS 

§ 92. Material Progress of the Country. 

In the preceding chapters we have attempted to give an 
idea of the state of industry and commerce in England in 
the Middle Ages. We now come to a most important 
landmark in the history of the social and industrial con- 
dition of the people — viz., the Great Plague of 1348 and 
subsequent years. Almost two centuries had elapsed since 
the death of Stephen (1154) and the cessation of those 
great civil conflicts which harried England in his reign. 
These two centuries had witnessed on the whole a con- 
tinuous growth of material prosperity. The wealth of the 
country had increased ; the towns had developed, and their 
development was partly the effect and partly the cause of 
the growth of a prosperous mercantile and industrial middle 
class, who regulated their own affairs in their gilds, and also 
had a voice in municipal management. No doubt it was 
true that in the fourteenth century municipal life was still 
on a small scale, 1 but much progress had been made since 
the twelfth century. Already it was a great advantage to 
be a * burgher," for the towns opened up to the artisan and 
shopkeeper a way to take their place among people of privi- 
lege. 2 But the country at large was still mainly devoted to 
agricultural and pastoral pursuits, and the mass of the 
people were engaged in tilling the ground or feeding cattle. 
The mass of the people, too, were now better fed and better 
clothed than those of a similar class on the Continent, and 
though there were social discontents at intervals, there was 
nothing in England so terrible and so outrageous as the 
" Jacquerie " revolt in France. The industrial factor, more- 
over, was making itself more and more felt in national and 
x Mrs Green, Town Life, i. 13. 2 Ib. y i. 181. 

149 



150 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

political life, for industrial questions assumed a hitherto 
unsuspected importance when a large proportion of the 
House of Commons was formed of burghers directly 
interested in trade and manufactures. 1 

§ 93. Social Changes. The Villeins and Wage- paid 
Labourers. 

Besides the growth of material prosperity in these two 
centuries, we find that the commutation of villeinage 
services into money payments to the lord of the manor — a 
tendency frequently commented upon — had been growing 
apace. 2 This commutation had been going on for a long 
time, in fact, ever since the Conquest, if not before, and the 
villeins had in many cases freed themselves not only from 
labour dues, but from the vexatious customary fines or 
" amercements " which they had to pay to the lord of the 
manor on certain social occasions — such as the marriage of 
a daughter, or the education of a son for the Church. 3 But 
of course this freedom was not complete, though it is im- 
portant to notice its growth, for we shall see that it formed 
the occasion of a great class struggle some years after the 
Great Plague. 

There is another feature which is also of importance, and 
which had come more and more into prominence during the 
past two centuries. I refer to the increase in the numbers 
of those who lived upon the labour of their hands, and were 
employed and paid wages like labourers of the present day. 
It has been mentioned before that they arose from the 
cottar class, from the small tenants and landless cottagers, 4 
who had not enough land to occupy their whole time, and 
who were therefore ready to sell their labour to an 
employer. These two features — the commutation of labour- 
dues for money payments and the rise of a wage-paid 
labouring class — are closely connected, for it was natural 
that, when the lord of a manor had agreed to receive 
money from his tenants in villeinage instead of labour, he 

1 Mrs Green, Town Life, i. 72. 2 Ashley, Econ. Hist, II. ii. 265, 267. 

3 The ordination of villeins had become so common that the constitutions 
of Clarendon were inclined to restrict it. Cf. Stubbs. Const. Hist. , I. ch. xi. 
p. 431 ; and Const. Clar., 16. 4 Ashley, Econ. Hist., II. ii. p. 267. 



THE GREAT PLAGUE 151 

should have to obtain other labour from elsewhere and pay 
for it in the money thus received by commutation. The 
tendency of these social changes was greatly in favour of 
the villeins, whose social condition had steadily improved, 1 
and whose tenancy in villeinage was fast losing its originally 
servile character. Neither were the villeins, whether com- 
paratively well-to-do yeomen or agricultural labourers, so 
much bound to the manor as formerly, for in proportion as 
their labour services were no longer necessary, their lord 
would let them leave the manor and seek employment, or 
take up some manufacturing industry, elsewhere. It had 
always been possible for the villeins or serfs to do this on 
payment of a small fine (capitagium), 2 and it is certain that, 
as money- payments became increasingly the fashion, the 
lord would not object to receiving this further payment, 
unless perchance he required a good deal of labour to be 
done upon his own land. 

§ 94. The Famine and the Plague. 

The position of the labouring class had been further im- 
proved by the effects of the famines which occurred in the 
early years of the fourteenth century. 3 Of course they suf- 
fered great hardships, and their numbers were considerably 
thinned, but at the same time this loss of life and diminu- 
tion in their numbers caused their services to become more 
valuable in proportion to their scarcity, and they gained a 
rise of some 20 per cent, in wages. 4 From this date till 
the coming of the Great Plague, some thirty years later, 
they and the rest of the English people enjoyed a period of 
great prosperity. 5 It was on the whole a " merry England" 
on which the Great Plague suddenly broke. The prosperity 
of the people was reflected in the splendour and brilliancy 
of the court and aristocracy, while the national pride had 
been increased by the recent capture of Calais (1347), and 
by the other successes in the French war, 6 which brought 

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist, II. ch. xvi. p. 454. 

2 Bracton, De Leg. (ed. Twiss), ch. x. /. 66 p. 49. 

3 Cf. Stowe, Annals, for 1314 and 1315 a.d. ; and Rogers, Six Centuries, 
p. 217. 4 Rogers, ib., p. 218. 5 Ib., 219 

G Green, History of English People, i. 429. 



152 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

not only glory but occasionally wealth, in the shape of 
heavy ransoms. But in 1348 the prosperity and pride of 
the nation was overwhelmed with gloom. The Great 
Plague came with sudden and mysterious steps from Asia 
to Italy, and thence to Western Europe and England, 
carried some say by travelling merchants, or borne with its 
infection on the wings of the wind. It arrived in England 
at the two great ports of Bristol and Southampton x in 
August 1348, and thence spread all over the land. Its 
ravages were frightful. Whole districts were depopulated, 
and about one-third of the people perished. 2 Norwich and 
London, being busy and crowded towns, suffered especially 
from the pestilence, and though the numbers of the dead 
have been grossly exaggerated by the panic of contem- 
poraries and the credulity of modern historians, 3 there can 
be no doubt that the loss of life was enormous. 4 The 
plague fell alike upon the dwellers in the towns, with their 
filthy, undrained streets, 5 and upon the labourers working in 
the open fields amid the fresh air and the sunshine. The 
same fate came to all. "The fell mortality came upon them, 
and the sudden and awful cruelty of death winnowed them." 6 

§ 95. The Effects of the Plague on Wages. 

The most immediate consequence of the Plague was a 
marked scarcity in the number of labourers available ; 7 for 

1 Henry of Knighton's Chronicle, ii. p. 61, ed. Lumby. 

2 Rogers {Six Centuries, p. 223) thinks one-third died ; Cunningham 
{English Industry, i. 304) thinks nearly half ; Denton {England in Fifteenth 
Century, p. 98) more than half. 

3 It was asserted by the fourteenth century chroniclers, and has often 
been repeated since, that nearly 60,000 people died in Norwich alone. 
Green (i. 429) says ' ' thousands of people " died at Norwich. As a matter of 
fact, the whole county of Norfolk, including that city, hardly contained 
30,000 people. Cf. Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 223. 

4 Cf. Jessop, Coming of the Friars, p. 193, who shows that half the parish 
priests of certain districts died during that year. The Chronicle of St 
Alkali's alone records (ii. 369) the death of more than forty-seven monks. 

5 Cf. Denton, Fifteenth Century, 103. 

6 This wonderfully vivid sentence is from Henry of Knighton's Chronicle, 
u. s., ii. p. 63. 

7 " There was such a want of servants in work of all kinds that one would 
scarcely believe that in times past there had been such a lack." Henry of 
Knighton's Chronicle, u. s., ii. p. 64. 



THE GREAT PLAGUE 153 

being of the poorest class they naturally succumbed more 
readily to famine and sickness. This scarcity of labour 
naturally resulted in higher wages. The landowners began 
to fear that their lands would not be cultivated properly, 
and w r ere compelled to buy labour at higher prices than 
would have been given at a time when the necessity of the 
labourer to the capitalist was more obscured. Hence the 
wages of labourers rose far above the customary rates. In 
harvest-work, 1 for example, the rise was nearly 60 per cent., 
and what is more, it remained so for a long period ; while 
the rise in agricultural wages generally was 50 per cent. 2 
So it was also in the case of artisans' wages, in the case of 
carpenters, masons, and others. 3 It seems that the upper 
classes and employers of that day very strongly objected to 
paying high wages, as they naturally do. The king him- 
self felt deeply upon the point. Without waiting for 
Parliament to meet, Edward III. issued a proclamation 4 
ordering that no man should either demand or pay the 
higher rate of wages, but should abide by the old rate. 
He forbade labourers to leave the land to which they were 
attached, and assigned heavy penalties to the runaways. 
Parliament assembled in 1350 and eagerly ratified this 
proclamation, in the laws known as the Statutes of 
Labourers. 5 But the demand for labour was so great 
that such legislative endeavours to prevent its proper 
payment were fortunately ineffective. Runaways not only 
found shelter, but also good employment and high wages. 6 
Parliament fulminated its threats in vain, and in vain 
increased its penalties by a later 7 statute of 1360, order- 
ing those who asked more than the old wages to be im- 
prisoned, and, if they were fugitives, to be branded with 
hot irons. For once the labourer was able to meet the 
capitalist on equal terms. Moreover, the effects of the 
Plague were not limited to those occasioned by the great 

1 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 234. 2 lb., p. 237. 3 lb., 234-237. 

4 On the 18th of June 1349 (23 Ed. III.); of. Rymer, Foedera, III. i. 
198, who apparently places it a year too late. 

5 The 25 Ed. III., stat. ii. e. 1, and later 31 Ed. in., stat. i. c. 6, and 
34 Ed. III., cc. 9, 10, 11. 

c Knighton's Chronicle, ut supra, p. 64. 7 34 Ed. III., cc. 9, 10, 11. 



154 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

visitation of 1348, for there were two or three other 
outbreaks of pestilence in subsequent years. 1 Thus the 
scarcity of labourers was felt more and more keenly by 
their former employers, and the landowners naturally did 
their best to compel them to work. 2 The class of free 
labourers and tenants who had commuted their services for 
money payments was oppressed, and " the ingenuity of the 
lawyers who were employed as stewards on each manor was 
exercised in trying to restore to the landowners that cus- 
tomary labour whose loss was now severely felt." 3 Former 
exemptions and manumissions were often cancelled, and 
labour services again demanded from the villeins. 4 The 
result was inevitably a gradual union of labourers and 
tenants of all classes against landowners and employers — 
the beginnings, in fact, of a social struggle, in which we 
recognise the unfortunate modern tendency of " a hostile 
confrontation of labour and capital." Combinations and 
confederacies of labourers became frequent, 5 and the strife 
grew more and more bitter, till the crisis came at last, and 
open revolt took place. " The difficulties of the manorial 
lords would be renewed with every subsequent visitation of 
the Plague, and the pressure on villeins to render actual 
service would become more severe, until at last it resulted 
in the general outbreak of the peasants in 1381." 6 Nor 
were the social troubles thus caused in any great degree 
diminished by the successes of Edward III. and the Black 
Prince in France, or even by the conclusion of peace at 
Bretigny (1360). Indeed, it must be obvious to anyone 
who considers how wars are paid for, that military success, 
unless it is a great deal more productive than was that of 
Edward III., really only makes matters worse, owing to the 
financial burdens which it imposes upon the people. And 

1 In 1361 and 1369. Annals of England (Parker), pp. 196, 197. 

2 Thus, the penalties are far more severe in the 34 Ed. III., c. 9, 10, 11, 
than in previous statutes. 

3 Green, History, i. 432. 

4 Cf. Stubbs, Const. Hist., II. ch. xvi. 455. 

5 The villeins "gather themselves together in great routs, and agree by 
such confederacy that everyone shall aid other to resist their lords," &c, 
&c. Stat. 1 Rich. II., c. 6. 

6 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. 357. 



THE GREAT PLAGUE 155 

as a matter of fact, misery and discontent continued, even 
after the Peace of Bretigny, to increase day by day. 1 

§ 96. Prices of Provisions. 

We must stop, however, to note the more economic 
effects of the Black Death. Now, although there was a 
great rise in the price of labour, the price of the labourers' 
food did not rise in proportion. The price of provisions, 
indeed, was but little affected, 2 for food did not then re- 
quire much manual labour in its production, and hence the 
rise of wages would not be much felt here. What did 
rise was the price of all articles that required much labour 
in their production, or the cost of which depended entirely 
upon human labour. The price of fish, for instance, is 
determined almost entirely by the cost of the fisherman's 
labour, and the cost of transit. Consequently we should 
under these circumstances expect a great rise in the price 
of fish, 3 and such indeed was the case. So, too, there was 
an enormous increase in the prices 4 of tiles, wheels, canvas, 
lead, iron-work, and all agricultural materials, these being 
articles whose value depends chiefly upon the amount of 
labour spent over them, and upon the cost of that labour. 
Hence, both peasant and artisan gained higher wages, while 
the cost of living remained for them much the same ; while 
those who suffered most were the owners of large estates, 
who had to pay more for the labour which worked these 
estates, and more too for the implements used in working 
them. It has, however, been pointed out, 5 on the other 
hand — and with some truth — that the lords of the manors 
must have gained a great deal, in the years during and 
immediately after the Plague, from the fees of " heriots " 6 

1 Green, History, i. 438. 

2 Grain, meat, poultry, etc., retain much the same prices as before the 
Plague, or are only a little dearer. Rogers, Six Centuries, 239. 

* lb., 240. 4 Z&.,238. 

5 By Jessop, The Black Death in E. Anglia, in The Coming of the Friars, 
p. 255, who also thinks that the rise in wages had begun before the Plague, 
and was merely accelerated by it. 

6 The " heriot was a payment from "a dead man to his lord"; the 
" relief " was paid by the son before he could succeed to his father's lands. 
See Stubbs, Const. Hist, i. pp. 261 and 24 note, 157. 



156 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

and " reliefs " which they received consequent upon so 
many tenants' holdings changing hands through death. 
But any sums of money thus gained came of course only 
from a transitory condition of affairs, while the rise of 
wages and (in some cases) of prices was more permanent. 
We may, however, legitimately suspect, as an inference 
from modern cases, that the lords of the manors and the 
employers made the most of their hardships, in the hopes 
that arrears of taxation might be lightened by Parliament. 1 

§ 97. Effects of the Plague upon the Landowners. 

The fact that the larger landowners found the cost of 
working their land doubled or even trebled caused im- 
portant economic changes. Before the Plague the cost of 
harvesting upon a certain estate, quoted by Professor Rogers, 2 
was £3, 13s. 9d. ; afterwards it rose to £12, 19s. lOd. 
Moreover, the landlord had to consent to receive lower 
rents, 3 for many tenants could not work their farms profit- 
ably with the old rents and the new prices for labour and 
implements. A.nd, as rent is paid out of the profits of 
agriculture, it became obvious that smaller profits must 
mean lower rents. Now, in this state of things the land- 
lord had two courses open to him. He could turn off the 
tenant and cultivate all his land himself, or he could try 
to exist upon the smaller income gained from lower rents. 
It was obviously impossible for him to cultivate all his land 
himself, for he would have to employ a large number of 
bailiffs for his various manors, and trust to their honesty 
to do their best for him. He therefore decided to allow 
his tenants to pay him a smaller rent. What is more, he 
in many cases decided under the circumstances to give up 
farming altogether, and to let even the lands which he had 
reserved for his own cultivation. 4 The landlords, in fact, 

1 Jessop, ut supra, p. 256. 2 Six Centuries, p. 241. 

3 In the words of Henry of Knighton's Chronicle {ut supra, ii. p. 65), the 
ords had "either entirely to free them, or give them an easier tenure at 

a small rent, so that homes should not be everywhere irrecoverably ruined 
and the land everywhere remain entirely uncultivated." 

4 This became even more frequent in the next century — the fifteenth. 
Stubbs, Const. Hist. , iii. 552. The new tenants were known as Jirmarii 



THE GREAT PLAGUE 157 

had not, apparently , either the ability or the inclination to 
superintend agriculture under these changed conditions, and 
ceased trying to work their land themselves. One great 
result of the Plague, therefore, was that landlords to a 
large extent gave up capitalist farming upon their own 
account, and let their tenants cultivate the soil upon the 
modern tenant-farming method. There was, in fact, a com- 
plete change introduced into the agricultural system, the 
foundations of the modern arrangement of comparatively 
large farms, 1 held by tenants and not by small owners, 
were laid, and the present distinction between the farmer 
and the labourer was more clearly established. 2 

§ 98. Large and Small Holdings: the Yeomen. 

This change in the agricultural situation also operated in 
other ways. Concurrently with the greater development of 
the modern system of tenant farmers, there is reason to 
believe 3 that the Plague caused in many places the con- 
centration of several estates into one, in cases where numer- 
ous deaths had resulted in the succession of a single heir to 
the estates of his stricken relatives, and thus the tendency 
towards the combination of large estates in few lands was 
strengthened, and the great landowner became more clearly 
distinguished from his neighbours. " The gentry became 
richer and their estates larger." But at the same time 
there was also an undoubted tendency towards the multi- 
plication of small holdings, both those in the hands of 
tenants and of owners, so that the class of peasant-farmers 
and yeomen greatly increased in numbers. 4 

The circumstances of the time favoured these, for the 
rise in the price of labour was not so severely felt by this 
class, since they could and did use the unpaid labour of 
their families upon their holdings. 5 Then, when they had 

(i.e., those who paid a Jirma or fixed rent), " f ermors, " or "farmers." 
Ashley, Econ. Hist, II. ii. 267. 

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. ch. xvi. 400 ; Rogers, Hist. Agric. and Prices, 
i. 667. - lb. 

3 Jessop, The Black Death in East Anglia, in The Coming of the Friars, 
p. 251. 

4 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 241. 5 lb. 



158 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

tided over the immediate results of the Plague, they took 
larger holdings as they grew richer. They were helped in 
this by the stock and land lease system already referred 
to (p. 114), which gave them the use of a larger quantity 
of agricultural capital than they could otherwise have com- 
manded. But when the tenant-farmer's wealth increased 
he found himself able, as a rule, to keep his own stock. 

§ 99. The Statute of Quia Emptor es. 

It also would appear that, independently of the effects of 
the Plague, the number of substantial yeomanry (some of 
whom helped later to swell the numbers of the country 
gentry) was increasing from another cause. Little more 
than ha]f a century before the Black Death, the Crown had 
thought it necessary to introduce the well-known Statute 
of Quia Emptores. This enactment 1 was intended to 
prevent the practice of " subinfeudation/' whereby the 
tenants of the greater lords received other and smaller 
tenants on condition of their rendering to them feudal 
services similar to those which they themselves rendered to 
their original lords. The Statute of Quia Emptores 2 
purposed to check this process by providing that in any 
case of alienation of land to a sub-tenant, this sub-tenant 
should hold it, not of the other tenant, but of the superior 
lord or real owner. The intention undoubtedly was to 
prevent the alienation of land, but, as so often happens 
with legislative enactments, the actual result was of a 
directly opposite character. The tenant who, previously, 
had been compelled to retain in any case at least so much 
of his holding as enabled him to fulfil his feudal obligations 
to his overlord, was now able (by a process similar to the 
modern sale of " tenant right ") to transfer both land and 
services to new holders. 3 The estates thus transferred, 
however large or small they might be, were now held 
directly of the Crown or superior lord ; and the class of 

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist., II. ch. xv. p. 180; Taswell Langmead, English 
Const. Hist., pp. 62, 138, 228. 

2 The king (Edward I.) enacted this "by the instance of his magnates 
only" {ad instantiate magnatumregni sui) on July 8th, 1290(18 Ed. I., c. 1). 

'* Green, History, i. 336, 



THE GREAT PLAGUE 159 

small gentry and freeholders grew steadily from this time 
both in numbers and importance. The Plague assisted the 
tendency of the Statute, and an important social change 
was thereby wrought. " The facilities thus given to the 
alienation and subdivision of lands ; the transition of the 
serf into the copyholder, and of the copyholder by redemp- 
tion of his services into a freeholder ; the rise of a new 
class of 'farmers,' as the lords ceased to till their demesne 
by means of bailiffs, and adopted instead the practice of 
leasing it at a rent or 'farm' (firma) to one of the 'cus- 
tomary ' tenants ; the general increase of wealth which 
was telling on the social position, even of those who still 
remained in villeinage — all undid more and more the earlier 
process which had degraded the free ceorl of the English 
Conquest into the villein of the Norman Conquest, and 
covered the land with a population of yeomen, some free- 
holders, some with services that every day became less 
weighty and already left them virtually free." * The 
yeomanry of England formed henceforth for several cen- 
turies an important factor in national life, and their decline ' 
was a national misfortune. 2 

§ 100, The Emancipation of the Villeins. 

In fact, the gradual amelioration of the conditions of 
villeinage or serfage received a forcible impetus from the 
Great Plague. Those villeins who had not already become 
free tenants, and especially those who lived on wages, 3 
shared in the advantages now gained by all who had labour 
to sell. Their labour was more valuable, and they were 
able with their higher wages to buy from their lord a com- 
mutation of those exactions which interfered with their 
personal freedom of action, 4 with their right to sell their 
labour to other employers, or with their endeavours to 
reach a better social position. Serfage or villeinage gradu- 

• l The extract, which gives a good summary of the conclusions of other 
writers, is from Green, History of the English People, i. 420. 

2 For this decline, see below, p. 276. 

8 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 242. 

4 " Money payments were substituted for service." Stubbs, Const. 
Hist., II. ch, xvi. p. 454. 



160 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

ally became practically a mere form, 1 though the land- 
owners, supported by the lawyers, 2 interposed many ob- 
stacles in the path of emancipation, and a great Revolt 
was necessary to enable the villeins to show their power. 
This revolt and its result must now engage our atten- 
tion. 3 

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist., II. ch. xvi. p. 254. "It was by a mere legal 
form that the villein was described as less than free." 

2 lb. , p. 455. The lawyers seem to have been against the freedom of 
villeins ever since the Norman Conquest. Of. Vinogradoff, Villeinage in 
England, pp. 134, 150, &c, &c. 

3 Of course villeinage did not die out all at once ; nor would it be neces- 
sary for me to say so, were it not for the perversity of certain critics, who 
imagine that, because I attach great importance to the Plague and the 
Peasant's Revolt, I maintain that villeinage ceased suddenly. For sur- 
vivals, see later, p. 171. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE PEASANTS' EEVOLT OF 1381, AND THE SUBSEQUENT 
CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASSES 

§ 101. The Place of the Revolt in English History. 

The Revolt to which allusion has just been made has 
been described by ODe of our greatest and most careful his- 
torians l as " one of the most portentous phenomena to be 
found in the whole of our history"; nor has the criticism 2 
of those who have endeavoured to minimise its results suc- 
ceeded in depriving it of its historical importance. " The 
extent of the area over which it spread, the extraordinary 
rapidity with which intelligence and communication passed 
between the different sections of the revolt, the variety of 
cries and causes which combined to produce it, the mystery 
that pervades its organisation, its sudden collapse and its 
indirect permanent results, give it a singular importance 
both constitutionally and socially." 3 It is therefore of 
interest to note the various influences which produced such 
an uprising, and to examine the various grievances which 
the villeins of the fourteenth century endeavoured to redress 
by such revolutionary methods. The revolt was undoubtedly 
serious, and would certainly have had far more sanguinary 
consequences, had it occurred later than it actually did. 
Fortunately the working classes of England were not so 
utterly ground down beneath the heel of their superiors as 
was the case across the Channel, and they resented their 

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist., II. ch. xvi. p. 449. 

2 Cf. Ashley's criticism of J. E. Thorold Rogers in The Political Science 
Quarterly, Vol. IV., No. 3, September 1889. Also Cunningham, Growth 
of English Industry, Vol. I. p. 360. But these historians practically 
admit all that Rogers really wished to prove, as my quotations show. 
See below, p. 172. 

3 Stubbs, ut ante, p. 450. 

T 161 



: 



1 62 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 



injuries sooner, otherwise England might have witnessed 
a few centuries later that volcanic upheaval of a slow 
peasantry, enraged by ages of seigneurial oppression, which 
burst with such terrific and long-contained violence over 
eighteenth century France. Fortunately, also, the upper 
classes of England seem to have taken warning in time 
from what happened in 1381, and did not in actual fact, 
whatever they may have said and thought, proceed to such 
foolish extremities as would have infallibly endangered both 
their property and their position. 

§ 102. New Social Doctrines. 

By no means the least important among the effects of the 
Great Plague was the spirit of independence which it helped 
to raise in the breasts of the villeins and labourers, more 
especially as they now gained some consciousness of the 
power of labour, and of its value as a prime necessity in 
the economic life of the nation. 1 There was, indeed, a 
revolutionary spirit in the air in the last quarter of the 
fourteenth century, and the villeins could not help breath- 
ing it. The social teaching of the author of Piers the 
Ploivman, with his outspoken denunciation of those who 
are called the upper classes, 2 the bold religious preaching of 
Wiklif and the wandering friars, and the marked political 
assertion of the rights of Parliament by the " Good Parlia- 
ment" 3 of 1376, were all manifestations of this spirit. It 
was natural, too, that, feeling their power as they did, the 
villeins should become restive when they heard from the 
followers of Wiklif that, as it was lawful to withdraw tithes 
from priests who lived in sin, so " servants and tenants may 
withdraw their services and rents from their lords that live 
openly a cursed life." 4 

1 Gf. Gower, Vox Clamantis, in Stubbs, u. s., ii. p. 454, where he 
describes hired labourers of the period of the Revolt, and accuses them 
of wishing to have too much of their own way. 

2 See below, p. 167. I have treated this more at length in English Social 
Reformers, pp. 5-25. 

3 Stubbs, Const. Hist., II. ch. xvi. pp. 428-433. "It marked the climax 
of a long rising excitement," p. 428. 

4 Wiklif, English Works (E.E.T.S.), p. 229, Of Lords and Servants, 



THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 138 1 163 

§ 103. The Coming of the Friars. Wiklif. 

Such, indeed, was the teaching that Wiklif promulgated, 
and it was carried throughout all England by that great 
association of wandering friars which he founded under the 
title of the " poor priests." 1 These men were like the 
mendicant friars who had come to England a century before 2 
to work in the poorer parts of the English towns ; though 
Wiklif 's priests generally wandered out 3 into the isolated and 
remote country villages, and spread abroad the independent 
doctrines and the revolutionary spirit of the times. Spend- 
ing their lives in moving about among the " upland folk," 
as the country people were called, clad in coarse, undyed, 
brown woollen garments, they won the confidence of the 
peasants, and what is more, helped them to combine in 
very effectual unions. 4 They served as messengers between 
those in different parts of the country, having passwords 
and a secret language of their own. 5 Their preaching was 
similar to that of the celebrated priest of Kent, John Ball, 
who for twenty years before the great rising (1360-80) 
openly spoke words like these — " Good people, things will 
never be well in England so long as there be villeins and 
gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords 
greater than we ? On what grounds have they deserved it ? 
Why do they hold us in serfage ? They have leisure and 
fine houses : we have pain and labour, and the wind and 
rain in the fields. And yet it is of us and our toil that 
these men hold their estate." These searching questions as 
to the rights of the lords, and the bold but true statement 

1 Green, History, i. 474. 

2 The Black Friars of Dominic came in 1221, and the Grey Friars of 
Francis in 1224. Jessop, Coming of the Friars, 32, 34. The Dominicans 
were "trained men of education addressing themselves mainly to the 
educated classes " ; the Franciscans appealed to the lowest and poorest 
class, and worked in the slums of the towns of those days. lb., 28, 21. 

3 Friars and "poor priests " were found everywhere ; cf. Wylie, England 
under Henry IV., ch. xvi. 

4 These unions or confederacies are complained of and prohibited 
(uselessly) by the Statute 1 Rich. II., c. 6 (1377). 

5 See the message of John Ball (himself, of course, a priest) to the com- 
mons of Essex, quoted in Skeat's Preface to Piers the Plowman, p. xxvi., 
and Green's History, i. p. 475. 



1 64 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

that it was the villeins and labouring classes who supported 
— and paid for — their high estate, came closely home to 
the peasants. They were influenced also by the indepen- 
dent religious views of the Lollards, 1 which encouraged inde- 
pendent thought in other ways. And this independence of 
social and religious tenets was hardly calculated to make 
the villeins bear with equanimity the exactions of their 
lords after the Great Plague. 

§ 104. The Renewed Exactions of the Landlords. 

For it must be remembered that the Great Plague did 
not emancipate the villeins, nor cause the landowners to 
give up farming on their own account immediately. The 
process, of course, took a few years, and in these few years 
the landowners made desperate efforts to avoid paying 
higher wages than formerly for labour. As it had now 
become costly, they insisted more severely upon the per- 
formance by their tenants of such labour dues as were not 
yet commuted for money payments. 2 They even tried to 
make those tenants who had emerged from a condition of 
villeinage to a free tenancy return back to villeinage again, 3 
with all its old labour dues and casual services. If a man 
could not prove by legal documentary evidence that he 
held his land in a free tenancy, the landowner might pre- 
tend he was a villein tenant, and subject to all a villein's 
services, although these services might long ago have been 
commuted for a money rent without any legal formality. 4 

1 Note the complaints against Lollard teaching in the Statute 2 Henry 

V., I. c. 7. 

2 As Stubbs puts it — "The villeins ignored the Statute [i.e., of 
labourers], and the lords fell back upon their demesne rights over the 
villeins" (Const. Hist., II. ch. xvi. p. 455). The point of view of the 
lords is expressed, plaintively enough, in the Statute 1 Rich. II., c. 6 — 
" The villeins and land-tenants in villeinage who owe services and customs 
to the said lords have now lately withdrawn and do daily withdraw their 
services and customs," &c, &c. 

3 " The old rolls were searched, the pedigree of the labourer was tested 
like the pedigree of the peer, and there was a dread of worse things com- 
ing " (Stubbs, ut ante, p. 455). 

4 This was no doubt the cause of the particular animosity shown against 
manorial documents, which in many cases the villeins tried to burn ; cf. 
Walsingham, Hist. Angl, i. 455. 






THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381 165 

There is much reason to believe, moreover, that they 
abused their power of inflicting " amercements," or fines, 
upon their tenants in the manor courts for trivial breaches 
of duty. 1 So at least Wiklif 2 and the author of Piers the 
Plowman 3 tell us. The villeins naturally resisted this 
attempt to make a retrograde movement, which would force 
them back into the old bondage from which they had 
redeemed themselves ; 4 the free tenants 5 supported them, 
for they knew their turn would come next if the serfs 
failed ; and the labouring classes in the towns — many of 
whom had kinsmen in the country, or had been villeins 
once themselves — eagerly joined the movement 6 also, in 
hopes of bettering their position generally. 

§ 105. Social and Political Questions. 

Meanwhile, other social and political grievances contri- 
buted to the general uneasiness. The state of the kingdom, 
instead of allaying, merely increased the undercurrent of 
discontent among the lower classes. The Statutes of 
Labourers, 7 by their endeavours to reduce the rates of 
wages to the old level of the days before the Plague, or to 
keep the multitudes of wandering labourers in search of 
work tied down to their own particular localities, only 
succeeded in widening the gulf and increasing the bitterness 
between rich and poor. Many of Edward's French con- 
quests had been lost since the Peace of Bretigny ; the Plague 
had come again with renewed devastations ; the Parliament 

1 Cf. Ashley, in his essay on Thorold Rogers in the Political Science 
Quarterly, Vol. IV., No. 3, p. 399, who mentions this very point, though 
he criticises severely Rogers' view of the case. Also cf. Ashley, Econ. 
Hist., II. ii. 265. 

2 Wiklif, English Works (E.E.T.S.), Of Lords and Servants, p. 233— 
' ' Lords many times do wrongs to poor men by unreasonable amerce- 
ments." 

3 Piers Plowman, Passus C, ix. 1. 37 (Skeat's ed., i. p. 197), " When ye 
amercyn any man let mercy be taxer." 

4 " With the teaching of Wiklif in the air, it was natural that the 
villeins should become restive." Ashley, Pol. Science Quarterly, IV., No. 3, 
p. 399. 

5 "The irritation spread to the whole class, whether bond or free." 
Stubbs, Const. Hist., II. xvi. 455. 

6 lb., p. 456. 7 Above, p. 153. 



1 66 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

had unwisely (1376 and 1379) sought to enforce the 
Statutes of Labourers still more stringently ; x the king 
himself was sinking into a premature old age, the victim of 
his own profligacy and of the designing ministers and 
avowed mistresses who surrounded him. His debts and 
the expenses of his French wars had become a fatal burden 
upon his own country. His continual levies of tenths and 
fifteenths upon the produce of the kingdom, especially upon 
wool, and his taxation of exports and imports, were seriously 
draining the resources of the nation. 2 To meet the expendi- 
ture on war abroad, and on luxury at the court, a poll-tax of 
a groat a head was ordained among the last acts of the dying 
king, 3 who passed away at last in June 1377, robbed of 
his rings even on his death-bed by his mistress, Alice 
Perrers. 4 

Richard II., who succeeded to the throne, was a child of 
only eleven years of age. The war with France was still 
going on, bringing continual disasters and defeats to the 
English troops even on our own shores ; 5 and at last, to 
meet its expenses, Parliament, meeting at Northampton on 
November 5th, 1380, granted the famous poll-tax which 
was the immediate cause of the Peasants' Revolt. 6 The 
tax was now made 12d. instead of a groat (4d.), as it had 
been previously, 7 and was levied on every person above 
fifteen years of age. 8 Although it was graduated, its lowest 
limit was yet three times the previous tax, and it was col- 
lected also in the most odious manner, for the troops who 
had just returned from France, after the conclusion of peace 
in January 1381, were clamorous for pay, and, to meet 

1 Above, p. 153. 

3 Rot. Pari., ii. 310; Stubbs, Const. Hist., II. xvi. 424. 

3 Rot. Pari. , ii. 364. It was granted by Parliament on February 22, 1377. 

4 Green, History, i. 470. 

5 In July and August 1377, the French ravaged the Isle of Wight, and 
burned Hastings and Rye, and in August 1380 they ravaged the whole of 
the south coast. Annals of England (Parker), sub anno. 

6 Rot. Pari, iii. 88-90. 

7 A graduated poll-tax had been granted in 1379, the lowest tax being 
a groat on every person over sixteen years of age, while earls paid £4. 
Rot. Pari, iii. 57, 58. 

8 Prince, Parallel History, i. 659 (ed. 1842) ; Hume's History of England, 
iii. 6 (ed. 1818). 



THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381 167 

their demands, the ministers borrowed a large sum from 
foreign merchants, assigning them this tax in return, and 
allowing them to appoint their own collectors. 1 

§ 106. The Mutterings of a Storm. 

This new oppression brought the discontent of the people 
to a climax. But the discontent had long been making 
itself felt, and was only waiting for a definite opportunity to 
burst forth into flame. As we saw, 2 the poorer villeins and 
labourers had long since banded together in trades unions 
of a secret sort, while the " poor priests " of Wiklif and 
the " begging friars " 3 had long been wandering from 
village to village, carrying the messages of the angry 
peasants from one to another, and preaching social reform, 
if not social equality. Quaint letters in rude rhyme passed 
through the peasant ranks — the voice of " Piers the Plow- 
man " was making itself heard. Here is an epistle 4 from 
John Ball, issued from the prison into which he had been 
thrown, to the people of Essex — " John the Shepherd, 
sometime St Mary's priest of York and now of Colchester," 
it ran, " greeteth well John Nameless, and John the Miller, 
and John the Carter, and biddeth them beware of guile 
in the town and stand together in God's name ; and he 
biddeth Piers the Plowman go to his work, and chastise 
well Hob the Robber 5 ; and take with you John True-man 
and all his fellows and no more ; and look sharp and go 
ahead (loke scharpe you to go on heved) and no more." 
Some rhyme follows, and the letter concludes — " And so 
biddeth John Truman and all his fellows." It is obvious 
that this letter contains a message clearly intelligible to 
those for whom it was meant, but of no meaning to others, 
while the obscure references to " Piers the Plowman " 
would be easily interpreted by the proper readers thereof. 
Another letter runs — 

1 The story of the collectors' alleged misbehaviour is well known. 

2 Above, p. 163. 3 Chron. AngL, p. 312. 
4 Quoted in Skeat's Introduction (p. xxvi.) to Piers the Ploivman. 

5 This probably meant that the agricultural labourer is to rise against 
the lord who was "robbing" him of his rights. 



1 68 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

" John Ball 
Greeteth you all. 
And doth for to understand 
He hath rung your bell. 
Now right and might ! 
Will and skill ! 
God speed every dele ! " x 

Such were the hidden messages and passwords that were 
whispered from one villein to another, or carried by wander- 
ing friars, throughout the length and breadth of the land, 
till at length the storm broke, and all at once, in Yorkshire 
and Lancashire, in Suffolk and Essex, in Kent and in 
Devon, north, west, east, and south, 2 the peasantry of 
England rose as one man against their masters. 

§ 107. The Storm Breaks Out 

The simultaneous nature of the rising leaves us no doubt 
that it was preconcerted. The collectors of the poll-tax 
seem to have been openly opposed first in Essex, 3 and when 
Sir Thomas Belknap, a judge, was sent to punish the 
rioters, he was obliged to flee for his life. Almost at the 
same time a workman, named Wat or Walter the Tyler, 4 
killed a collector who, it is said, insulted his daughter. 

According to documents in the Public Record Office, " a 
cry was raised that no tenant should do service or custom 
to the lords as they had aforetime done," 5 and immediately 
bands of town workmen in some cases, and of rustics in 
others, assembled together under the leadership of men 
with assumed names, such as Jack the Miller and Jack 
Straw. In Kent they burst open the gaols, seized William 
de Septvanz the Sheriff, and compelled him to deliver up 
the taxation rolls, which were promptly burnt. 6 But these 
acts were not the immediate object of the villeins. After 

1 Part. 

2 "Far more rapidly than the news could fly," says Stubbs, II. xvi. 450. 

3 Walsingham, i. 454. Stubbs, ut supra, 457. 

4 It seems to have been really John Tyler of Dartford who did this, but 
Wat Tyler of Maidstone is often confused with him. Cf. Stubbs, p. 456, 
note. 

5 Of. Annals of England (Parker, Oxford, 1876), p. 203. 

6 Arch. Cant., iii. 76. 



THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381 169 

releasing John Ball from Maidstone Gaol, they proceeded, as 
all know, to London, demanding not merely the abolition of 
the unjust poll-tax, bat (what is significant as showing the 
real nature of the rising) also the relief of the rural popula- 
tion from the exactions of their lords. 1 It is significant 
also to note how many clergy were in the ranks of the in- 
surgents, for in indictments made after the rising 2 we find 
the chaplain of one church, the sacristan of another, and 
the clerk of a third, charged with heading mobs that sacked 
stewards' houses and burnt court-rolls. 3 The mass of 
peasants and others assembled at Blackheath on June 12th, 
1381, entered London the following day, then seized the 
Tower, and murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury and 
the King's Treasurer. On the 14th the men of Essex met 
Richard at Mile End, and on the 1 5th the men of Kent 
had a conference with him at Smithfield, when their chief 
leader, Wat the Tyler, was slain by the Lord Mayor of 
London. 4 

The details of those meetings are almost too well known 
to need repetition here. But the demands of the men of 
Essex prove clearly the real origin of the movement. " We 
will that you free us for ever, us and our lands," they 
asked, " and that we be never named or held as villeins." 
"I grant it," said the' King, with regal diplomacy, and the 
peasants believed him. 5 He gave the same promise to the 
men of Kent, and it was only after receiving his letters of 
emancipation 6 that the reformers returned to their homes, 
though the rising was not yet entirely at an end, for one 
party certainly remained in arms up to July 1st. 7 

But the peasants learned very soon how vain a thing it 

1 They demanded (1) abolition of bondage, (2) a general pardon, (3) 
abolition of tolls, (4) the commutation of villein services. See Richard 
II. 's patent revoking manumissions; Rymer, Foedera, iv. 216. 

2 Cf. Annals, p. 204 ; Rot. Pari, iii. 108. 

3 These were the records of the manorial courts held by the lords of the 
manors. Rot. Pari., iii. 116; Walsingham, Hist. Angl., i. 455. 

4 Stubbs, Const. Hist., ii. p. 458. 

5 Walsingham, Hist. Angl., i. 459. 

6 "We release you from ail bondage." Walsingham, i. 466, 467, and 
cf 473. 

7 Annals of England, p. 204, note. 



170 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

was to put their trust in princes. Within a fortnight (on 
June 30th) Richard issued a proclamation that all tenants, 
whether villeins or free, should render all accustomed 
services as heretofore ; x and on July 2nd he formally 
annulled the charters of freedom, 2 a step that was sub- 
sequently sanctioned by Parliament when it met again on 
November 5th (5 Richard II., c. 6). Special commis- 
sioners were sent into the country to punish the insurgents, 3 
and it would seem that as many as 1500 persons were 
executed by their orders. 4 Everywhere the peasants and 
their leaders were put down by the severest measures. 
Richard marched through Kent and Essex with an army of 
40,000 men, ruthlessly punishing all resistance. 5 "Villeins 
you were," he cried, as the men of Essex claimed from him 
his own royal promise ; " villeins you were, and villeins you 
are. In bondage you shall abide, and that not your old 
bondage, but a worse ! " 6 At St Alban's John Ball was 
hanged on July 15th, 7 and so, too, was another leader, one 
Grind-cobbe, as he was called. But as he died Grind- 
cobbe uttered the words, which, in spite of king and lords, 
at last came true — " If I die, I shall die for the cause of 
the freedom we have won, counting myself happy to end 
my life by such a martyrdom." 8 

§ 108. The Result of the Revolt. 

And, as a matter of fact, the peasants in reality gained 
their point. They had to shed their own blood, but they 
won in the end. The landowners in Parliament certainly 
refused any notion of compromise at first ; they even prayed 
the King to ordain " that no bondman nor bondwoman (i.e., 
no villein) shall place their children at school, as had been 
done, so as to advance their children in the world by their 

1 Rymer, Foedera, iv. 126. 3 lb. 

3 Richard himself had to interfere to repress their severity. Rymer, 
Foed., iv. 133. 

4 Annals, p. 205; Stubbs, quoting Mon. Evesh., p. 33, says that in all 
7000 insurgents were executed. 

5 Green, History, i. 484. 6 Walsingham, Hist. Angl., ii. 18. 

7 Stubbs, Const. Hist., ii. p. 452, note. 

8 Green, History, i. 485. 



THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381 171 

going into the church." 1 They even asked that lords might 
reclaim villeins from the chartered towns, 2 but the king 
had the sense to refuse both petitions. The poor priests, 
unlicensed preachers, or " Lollards," were ordered to be 
arrested or held in strong prison " until they justify them- 
selves according to the law and reason of Holy Church." 3 
But after the first year or two, all these efforts fortunately 
proved abortive. Yilleinage rapidly became practically 
extinct, and commutation of labour services for money rents 
became more and more common. 4 Evidence of this is seen 
in the whole tone of the writings of Fitzherbert, the author 
of a well-known work, " On Survey inge" who, about 1530, 
instead of regarding the surviving instances of villeinage as 
quite the natural thing, laments over its continuance as a 
disgrace to the country — a marvellous change of attitude 
since the fourteenth century. 5 Almost the last cases of 
survival occurred under Elizabeth, 6 who enfranchised the 
bondmen on royal estates in 1574, though a few later 
notices of the custom appear. No doubt some traces of the 
old order remained for centuries ; indeed, it would have 
been strange if such had not been the case. Although, for 
instance, the old manorial system is long since dead, its 
relics survive among us to-day, and courts leet are still held 
in many places. Yet no one contends that the manor sur- 
vives as in the fourteenth century. But, speaking broadly, 
the peasants achieved their object; the labours of John 
Ball, Tyler, and Grinde-cobbe were not altogether futile ; 
and the century that followed the Great Revolt was, on 
the whole, one of considerable prosperity for the English 
labourer. 7 

1 Bot. Pari, iii. 294, 296. 2 lb. 

3 5 Ric. II., st. 2, c. 5. 4 Stubbs, Const. Hist., II. eh. xvi. 463. 

5 Cf. Cunningham, i. p. 360, who, however, thinks villeinage did not die 
out so quickly. 

6 Rymer, Foed., xv. 731. 

7 In this account of the Peasants' Revolt I find myself in agreement with 
the general conclusions of Thorold Rogers, though the careful reader will 
notice that none of the references in the footnotes refer to his works, but 
are taken from other authorities. Some modern economic historians have 
criticised (with more or less severity) the conclusions of this eminent 
authority, but, curiously enough, when their own theories are looked into, 



172 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

§ 109. The Condition of the English Labourer. 

After this great insurrection came a time of considerable 
prosperity for the English labourer, and it lasted all 
through the fifteenth century. Food was cheap and 
abundant ; wages were amply sufficient. In fact, soon 
after the Revolt a statute of 1388 complains of them 
being " outrageous and excessive." 1 True, the employers of 

they merely confirm those held by Thorold Rogers, at least in their broad 
outlines. Professor W. J. Ashley has an elaborate criticism of Rogers' 
work in general and his theory of the Peasants' Revolt in particular in the 
Political Science Quarterly, Vol. IV., No. 3, and roundly accuses Rogers of 
belonging to the " cataclysmic school" (p. 400) of history, of seeking after 
dramatic effect rather than absolute truth, and of not being " guided by 
the idea of gradual, reasonable, undramatic development " in history (p. 
407). Unfortunately for this criticism, however, human history, even on 
its economic side, refuses to be either gradual, undramatic, or even con- 
sistently reasonable. If it were, it would not be human, though it might 
be academic — a dubious gain. There have been sudden and dramatic 
developments often enough, as witness the discovery of the New World, 
and its conquest by the Spaniards ; or the rise of Napoleon ; or the very 
dramatic (not to say theatrical) French Revolution. The Industrial Revo- 
lution in England was rightly called by Toynbee a revolution and not an 
evolution, for it presents a sudden and by no means gradual development. 
And the Peasants' Revolt was certainly one of the "dramatic " developments 
of our social history. It is impossible to read contemporary documents 
without noticing the important place it took in the minds of those who lived 
through it, short though it was ; and I am prepared to follow Bishop 
Stubbs in his estimate of it rather than attempt to minimise its importance. 
As to the cause of the revolt as set forth by Stubbs and Rogers, Professor 
Ashley says (P. S. Q., p. 399), "Certainly no evidence has yet been adduced 
that can be regarded as confirming it." This is utterly to ignore the words 
of Wiklif, " Piers the Plowman" and the preambles to the statutes of the 
day. As a matter of fact, however, Professor Ashley quotes them himself, 
and admits from them practically all Rogers' conclusions as to the origin 
of the Revolt. Dr Cunningham {Growth of English Industry, i. 359-360) 
does the same, and, of course, both declare that the Revolt failed. Dr 
Cunningham says that in the fifteenth century services were still rendered 
by villeins (i. 360), and thinks this fact alone proves the failure. Of course 
services continued to be rendered, but they were on a very different footing 
than in the days before the Revolt. From 1381 onwards we find them no 
longer flourishing but decaying, and within one hundred years they are 
practically, and in two hundred almost entirely, extinct. Considering 
how many relics of the old manorial system survive in the nineteenth 
century, is it not a little remarkable that villeinage died out so rapidly ? 
No historian in his senses would say that services ceased immediately after 
the Revolt, but we need not deny that from that time forward they began 
to die out more rapidly than before. 

1 12 Rich. II., cc. 3-7, preamble — "The servants and labourers will not 



THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 138 1 173 

labour still tried, by various petitions and Acts, 1 to enforce 
the Statute of Labourers, but they were practically unsuc- 
cessful, and prosperity seems to have been progressive and 
continuous till the days of Henry VIII. The wages of a 
good agricultural labourer, before the Plague, have been 
calculated at £2, 7s. lOd. per year as an average, 2 includ- 
ing the labour of his wife and child ; after the Plague his 
wages would be £3, 15s., and the cost of his living 
certainly not more than £3, 4s. 9d. An artisan, working 
300 days a year, would get, say, £3, 18s. ljd. before 
1348, and after that date £5, 15s. 7d., which was so far 
above the cost of maintenance as to give him a very com- 
fortable position. 3 By the day 4 wages were for agricultural 
labourers 4d. a day, and for artisans, 6d. His working 
day, too, was probably not excessive, 5 for although the 
legal day was one of about twelve hours 6 for agricultural 
labourers, it is pretty certain that, as in other cases, the 
statutes were generally evaded. Rents were low, and these 
low rents were one great cause of the prosperity of the new 
yeoman or tenant farmer class (p. 157) that had arisen 
after the collapse of the capitalist landowners in conse- 
quence of the Plague — a class which remained for at least 
two centuries the backbone of English agriculture. 

Several recent historians, however, have taken a view of 
the labourer's life in the fifteenth century that by no means 
agrees with the pleasant condition of things which the 
statistics of wages seem to indicate. Instead of accepting 
the fifteenth century as an era of great prosperity, they have 
endeavoured to paint from various sources a very different 

serve and labour without outrageous and excessive hire, and much more 
than hath been given in any time past." The Act then goes on to fix wages. 
Surely this is a sign of the practical success of the Peasants' "Revolt. 

1 For example, 7 Henry IV., c. 17 ; 23 Henry VI., c. 12 ; 11 Henry VII., 
c. 22, and others. 

2 Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 290, 684, 689, and iv. 757. 3 lb. 

4 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 327. 

5 Rogers infers from various grounds (Hist. Agric., iv. 755) that the 
working day was of only eight hours, chiefly arguing from the heavy pay- 
ments for overtime. Dr Cunningham (1-477) thinks the contrary, and 
quotes the Acts of 11 Hen. VII, c. 22, and 6 Hen. VIII., c. 3. 

6 See the two Acts just quoted. 



174 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

and very gloomy picture. When it is pointed out that 
wages were high both for artisans and labourers, while the 
prices of food were particularly low, it is contended on the 
other hand that the high wages were only those paid by 
the day, that yearly wages were much lower, and that even 
for day labourers employment was not constant. 1 The bal- 
ance of advantage is said to lie with the modern artisan. 2 
If we take the " common servant in husbandry," it is said, 
we find 3 he is only paid 20s. 8d. a year, and his wife only 
14s., though their food is provided; and even the bailiff 
only gets 26s. 8d. a year, with 5s. extra for clothing, and 
his food as well. But it must be remembered that the 
statute which prescribes these rates is, of course, laying 
down the minimum rates, 4 and there is not the slightest 
doubt that far higher wages were habitually paid, not 
merely for the work of a few days or weeks, but for work 
extending over a whole year. This, at any rate, is clear 
enough in the case of artisans, for at Windsor in 1408 we 
find carpenters getting 6d. and 5d. a day for 365 days in 
the year, 5 which shows that they were paid an annual 
wage at a daily rate, even including Sundays and holidays. 
We find similar high wages at York, while at Oxford men 
were paid full rates and fed by the College as well. 6 As 
for agricultural labourers, it must be noted that the 
majority of them lived in their master's house, 7 when they 
did not happen to be the sons of small tenants, or tenants 
themselves, 8 who had their land to fall back upon. Those 
who lived in their master's house would certainly be well 
fed while there, 9 for food was both abundant and cheap. 
Even the minimum basis of wages just quoted (20s. 8d. 
per year) cannot be called low, when we remember that it 
represents between £12 and £13 of our money, 10 in addi- 
tion to good board and lodging. Many an agricultural 

1 Cf, e.g., Cunningham, Growth of English Industry, i. 348, 349. 

2 lb., 349. 3 In the 11 Henry VII., c. 22. 
4 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 389. 5 lb., 328. 

6 lb., 328. 7 Froude, History of England, i. p. 5. 

8 Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 689, 691. 9 Froude, History, i. 21. 

10 Taking the now generally admitted multiple of twelve to compare 
prices of to-day with those of the fifteenth century ; cf. Rogers, Six 
Centuries, p. 539, 172 ; Froude, History, i. 26. 



THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 138 1 175 

labourer in the last decade of the nineteenth century would 
be only too glad to obtain such payment. 1 Nor need we be 
surprised that the bailiff only gets 31s. 8d. (equivalent to 
some £1 9) a year, always supposing that his employer kept 
within the statute, though this is unlikely ; for it is charac- 
teristic of the Middle Ages that superior servants and work- 
men were paid but little above the average of those whom 
they superintended. 2 But, as a matter of fact, there are 
plenty of instances of bailiffs getting far higher wages, such 
as from £3 and £5 to over £9 per annum. 3 And when 
we come to consider that the average income of a country 
gentleman 4 was only about £20 per annum in Henry VI.'s 
days, it is evident that the bailiff was very well paid indeed, 
and that there was even no such enormous disproportion 
between the effective incomes of the labourer and the squire 
as there is to-day. 

§ 110. Purchasing Power of Wages. 

But it is useless to mention the rates of wages unless we 
can estimate at the same time their purchasing power ; and 
when we do so, we see that they were amply sufficient, even 
taking the statutory rates, to purchase for the labourer and 
artisan an abundance of good and cheap food. An artisan 
earning 5d. or 6d. a day, or an agricultural labourer earning 
3d. or 4d., 5 could get plenty of bread, beef, and beer at very 
low prices. For beef was only Jd. a pound, and mutton 
fd. ; 6 strong beer only Id. a gallon, and table-beer a half- 
penny. 7 The price of corn averaged a little under 6s. a 
quarter, 8 and other kinds of grain were equally cheap ; 

1 In Notts from £7 to £16 per annum are wages quoted in Royal Com- 
mission on Labour Report, Agric. Labourer, I. B. V. 127. 

2 It certainly was so with artisans. Rogers, Hist. Agric, iv. 502-504. 

3 See wages quoted from manorial accounts by Rogers, Hist. Agric, 
i. 287, iv. 119 (where the statutory wages are also mentioned). 

4 This was the income qualifying a country gentleman to be a J. P. by the 
18 Henry VI., c. 11. 

5 These wages are those laid down by the 6 Hen. VIII. , c. 3, the lower 
rates being paid in the winter. 6 Stow's Chronicle, p. 568. 

7 Assize of Brewers, from a MS. in Balliol College, Oxford, quoted by 
Froude, History, i. 24. 

8 The average from 1260-1400 a.d. is 5s. lOfd. a quarter ; from 1401 to 
1540 it is 5s. ll|d. Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 330. 



176 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

chickens cost Id. or 2d., and a pig or goose only 4d. 1 The 
cheapness of provisions is seen from the fact that 6d. or 8d. 
a week was an ordinary estimate for the board of a work- 
man, 2 and 2d. a day or Is. a week was liberal. 3 Indeed, the 
good food enjoyed by the " common people " was the wonder 
of all foreigners. " What common folk in all this world 
may compare with the commons of England in riches, free- 
dom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity ? " is the question 
in one of Henry VIII.'s State papers; 4 and chroniclers tell 
us that the food of "artificers and husbandmen consisteth 
principally in beef, and such meat as the butcher selleth, 
that is to say, mutton, veal, lamb, pork, whereof one findeth 
great store in the markets adjoining " ; 5 while " souse, brawn, 
bacon, fruit, pies of fruit," and " fowls of sundry sorts " were to 
be found in most workmen's homes. 6 Surely it is sufficient 
evidence of the prosperity of the working classes when food 
of this description was so easily within their reach. In fact, 
it is pretty clear that the close of the fourteenth century 
witnessed the beginning, and the fifteenth century the con- 
tinuance, of an era to which the oppressed labourer of later 
times might well look back with admiration and regret. 
Holidays were frequent, 7 and if a man lost his wages during 
them, there was generally plenty of extra work, well paid, 
in harvest time 8 to compensate for loss of time elsewhere. 
The Saturday half-holiday, lost subsequently and only 
recently restored, seems to have been universal. 9 In the 
leisure time thus falling to his lot, the agricultural labourer 
could work upon the land which then invariably went with 

1 Stafford, State of the Realm, quoted by Froude, History, i. 23. 

2 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 328. 3 lb., p. 329. 

4 State Papers, Henry VIII. , Vol. II. p. 10. 

5 Harrison, Description of England, p. 282. 

6 lb. He adds, "in feasting it is incredible what meat is consumed and 
spent." His book was written in the sixteenth century, but it shows that 
the condition of the working classes was fairly good even then, after the 
troubles of Henry VIII. 's reign, and therefore was probably quite as good 
in the fifteenth century. 

7 Froude, History, i. 28, reckons one day in every twenty ; and it is 
evident that sometimes holidays were paid for. Rogers, Six Centuries, 327. 

8 Mowers could then get 8d. a day. Privy Purse Expenses of Henry 
VIII. (Froude, i. 28). 

9 Mrs Green, Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, ii. 133. 



THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 1381 177 

his cottage, while in every parish there were large ranges of 
commons, waste-land and forest, which gave him fuel for 
nothing, where his pigs might pick up mast and acorns or 
his geese feed freely, and where, if he had a cow, he might 
send her to graze. " So important was this privilege 
considered, that when the commons began to be largely 
enclosed, Parliament insisted that the working-man should 
not be without some piece of ground on which he could 
employ his own and his family's industry." 1 The " allot- 
ments " of the nineteenth century labourer, with their some- 
times excessive rentals, 2 are a poor recompense for such 
privileges. In those days, if contemporary evidence goes 
for anything, England was once in reality " Merrie England," 
and life, even if unrefined, was coloured with broad, rosy 
English health. 3 

§ 111. Drawbacks. 

There were, however, of course, several drawbacks in this 
pleasant era, as more than one critic has lately told us. 4 
The ordinary hardships of human life were in many respects 
greater than they are now — disease was more deadly, and 
the risks of life more numerous ; but from this very fact 
the extremes of poverty and wealth were less widely dis- 
tinguished and less acutely felt; and, although it cannot 
be asserted that people did not occasionally die of want in 
very bad times, yet the grinding and hopeless poverty, just 
above the verge of actual starvation, so often prevalent in 
the present time, did not belong to mediaeval life. The 
chief ordinary hardships to be encountered were in the 
winter, for, owing to the absence of winter roots, stock 
could not be kept except in limited quantities, 5 and the 

1 By the Act 31 Eliz. , c. 7, every cottage was to have four acres of land 
attached to it. For the points of the above description, cf. Froude, 
History, i. 28. 

2 Rents of 35s. an acre, 22s. 6d. an acre, lis. for one rood, 21s. for nearly 
half-an-acre, are quoted in Statistics of Midland Villages (1891-2) in the 
Economic Journal, Vol. III., No. 9. 

3 Froude, History, i. 46. 

4 Cf. Denton, Fifteenth Century, 105 ; Jessop, Coming of the Friars, 89, 
&c. (who, however, seems to refer to the thirteenth century) ; and Cunning- 
ham, i. 346, 347. 5 Rogers, Six Centuries, 78. 

M 



178 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

only meat procurable was that which had been previously 
salted. 1 It is certain that much of mediaeval disease is 
traceable to the excessive use of salted provisions. The 
houses, too, were rudely built of mud, clay, or even wattled 
material, for brick making was a lost art, and stone was 
only used for the manor-houses and the dwellings of the 
wealthy. 2 But food, as we saw, was abundant and cheap, 
and the cost of living was not more than one-tenth of what 
it is at the present day. 3 Nor were the houses quite so 
poorly furnished as some would have us thiok. Pictures, 
hangings, cushions, and feather beds were not unknown in 
the houses of plain country parsons with a salary of some- 
thing like £6 a year. 4 It is probable that even the houses 
of the peasants were, compared with the degree of luxury 
and comfort then attainable, no worse furnished propor- 
tionately than they are now ; and anyone who has seen 
Ann Hathaway's cottage at Stratford-on-Avon must admit 
that, as buildings, the dwellings of the labourer of to-day 
are often no improvement on those of the sixteenth century. 
But two hardships there undoubtedly were, which per- 
haps were more severe in mediaeval times than now. 
They were famine 5 and plague. The accounts of mediaeval 
famines have no doubt been much exaggerated, 6 and those 
that occurred were chiefly local, but it is obvious that when 
means of communication were less perfect than they are 
now, individual villages might often suffer severely, while 
in other parts of the country there was plenty. Yet after 
all it is doubtful whether there was any more real scarcity 
than there is to-day ; for deaths from sheer starvation are 
common enough among us even now ; and against the 
evidence of famine must be set the evidence of general 

1 Rogers, Six Centuries, 95. 2 lb. , 97. 

3 "A penny in terms of the labourer's necessities must have been nearly 
equal to the present shilling." Froude, History, i. 26. 

4 See the very valuable quotation in Froude, History, i. 41, of the furni- 
ture of the Parson of Aldington, Kent, from an MS. in the Rolls House. 
Cf. also Stubbs, Const. Hist., III. xxi. 555. 

5 See Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. 346, who quotes Holinshed and 
Stow. 

6 This is obvious from a comparison of prices, which rarely show such 
variations as would correspond with the terrible descriptions of chroniclers. 



THE PEASANTS' REVOLT OF 138 1 179 

plenty as being the normal condition of existence. No one 
would say that famines occurred regularly in England in 
the last decade of the nineteenth century, yet if one merely 
went by depositions at coroners' inquests a very good case 
might be made out by a critic of our civilisation. On the 
other hand, pestilence 1 was undoubtedly more common 
than now, and, of course, owing to lack of medical skill, 
more deadly ; but to talk of " chronic typhoid in the towns 
and leprosy all over the country " 2 as the normal state of 
things, is to give a totally wrong impression of the risks 
of mediaeval life. If our forefathers were more exposed to 
disease, the rude vigour of their constitutions, and the 
coarser texture of their nervous system, rendered them more 
impervious to its ravages. Probably, at least in the rural 
districts, the risks of life were not much greater than now, 
and though a great pestilence occasionally swept off its 
victims with tragic suddenness, there was probably not so 
much general ill-health and liability to death by easily 
thrown-off diseases as at the present day. 

1 Cf. Rogers, Six Centuries, 331, 335-337. 

2 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. 347, uses these words. Against 
them may be put Rogers' remark (Six Centuries, i. 331) that "if abundant 
evidence as to the rate of wages and silence as to loss of life [in manorial 
accounts] are to go for anything, it did not create a sensible void in the 
number of labourers." 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES 

§ 112. The Nobility. 

The period from the Peasants' Revolt (1381) to the first 
few years of the reign of Henry VIII. (1509-1548) presents 
many interesting features. In it we come to the close of 
mediaeval life, and begin the more modern history of our 
country. There are several important changes going on, 
yet, on the other hand, the main aspects of social life 
remain the same ; for the permanence of social features is 
characteristic of mediaeval times. 1 We may, therefore, take 
the facts presented in the previous section as giving us the 
outlines of a picture which, in all important points at any 
rate, lasted till the first half of the sixteenth century. The 
lives of the peasants and working classes were probably 
the same for quite a century. But meanwhile important 
social and economic changes were taking place. 

In the fifteenth century, to take the highest ranks first, 
the great nobles and feudal lords were at the height of 
their power and splendour ; but their glory was as that 
of the sun before it sinks suddenly out of sight amid a 
bank of stormy clouds. Fierce, ambitious, covetous, and 
unrelenting, greedy both of power and of land, they were 
nevertheless the political leaders of a people whom they 
alternately terrorised and cajoled, and they recognised the 
circumstances which their position entailed. 2 In their huge 
fortified houses and castles they kept enormous retinues of 
officers and servants, all arranged in distinct grades and 
provided with regular allowances of food and clothing. 3 
Their households were arranged upon a scale of almost 

1 Froude, History, i. p. 1. 

2 Of. Stubbs, Gonstit. History, Vol. III. ch. xxi. p. 542. 
z Ib., p. 538. 

180 



THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES 181 

royal magnificence, 1 and yet the most accurate accounts 2 
of income and expenditure were duly kept and audited. 
The baron's castle was both a court for the neighbour- 
ing squires, smaller nobles and gentry, and a school of 
knightly accomplishments and culture for their sons, while 
the huge kitchens and wardrobes afforded a continual 
market to the agriculturists and tradesmen of the district. 3 
His progresses from one establishment to another made 
him known all over the country, and increased his political 
prestige and popularity. The houses of the Bishops and 
other great church dignitaries, and some of the larger 
monasteries, rivalled those of the barons in their magnitude 
and influence. 4 The nobility and the great officers of the 
Church had, in fact, an amount of wealth and power which 
they have rarely surpassed at any time of their history. 

That power was also largely increased 5 in the fifteenth 
century by the practice of enclosing land, to which we 
shall refer later at greater length. The nobles saw that 
land meant both power and wealth, and grasped more and 
more of it as time went on. The Great Plague and the 
practical freedom of the villeins had indeed tried them 
sorely at first, but now a new use for land was springing 
up, 6 with a new system under which the services of their 
villeins were no longer required. I refer to the growing 
demand for wool, not only for foreign export but for home 
manufacture. 7 The growth of home manufactures encour- 
aged sheep-farming on a large scale, and sheep-farming 
led to the change from arable to pasturage which is charac- 
teristic of the fifteenth century. So field was added to 
field, pasture to pasture, enclosure to enclosure, and the 
great lords rejoiced anew in the wealth derived from their 
broad acres. The evils of maintenance and livery were 
increased ; the power of the nobility grew continually, often 

1 Cf Denton, Fifteenth Century, pp. 265-272. 

2 Stubbs, u. s., p. 539. 3 lb., p. 541. 4 Ib., p. 543. 

5 S. R. Gardiner, Students' History of England, i. 321. 

6 It was hardly because of the exhaustion of the soil that landowners 
turned arable into pasture, as Mr Gardiner {ut supra) seems to suppose. 
The land got rest under the system of fallow. 

7 Cf. Mrs Green, Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, i. 44. 



1 82 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

at the expense of their poorer neighbours ; * the Crown, 
till the accession of Henry VII., was far too weak 
to control the barons that stood round it ; the great 
families plundered the country, 2 until at last, quarrelling 
among themselves for place and power, they became their 
own destruction, and assured their speedy ruin and decay 
in those suicidal conflicts known as the Wars of the Roses. 

§ 113. The Country Gentry. 

Next to the greater nobility, and constituting in some 
measure a link between these and the yeomen, came the 
large body of knights and squires or country gentry, 3 allied 
to the nobility by claims of birth and descent, very often 
as ancient as those of the haughtiest baron, but by their in- 
come and rural habits often not far removed from a well-to- 
do farmer. The income 4 of a knight might be placed at 
£200 a year, of a squire £50, and while a substantial 
yeoman could rarely attain the former sum, he might easily 
surpass the latter. 5 The household of the country gentle- 
man was modelled on that of his greater neighbour, the 
noble, and was often in consequence more elaborate than 
we should have supposed necessary for his rank. 6 But food 
was abundant and cheap, and money wages were not high, 
while very often the servants were his own poor relations. 7 
In the cultivation and management of his estate the knight 
or squire found occupation and amusement ; and his share 
of public duty, both in county court and in musters and 
arrays, was by no means light. 8 He was hardly ever 
merely an " absentee landlord," but " lived of his own " on 
his own land, while a journey to London was the event of 
a lifetime, and not an annual occurrence. His life was 
simple and rough — nay, even, according to our modern ideas, 

1 Cf. Paston Letters (ed. Arber), Vol. I. 13-15, and Denton, Fifteenth 
Century, pp. 296-301. 

2 Cf Gardiner, Students' Hist, of England, i. 321 and 323. 

3 Stubbs, Const. Hist., III. xxi. p. 544. 

4 From the Black Booh of Edward IV. (Stubbs, u. s., p. 538). 

8 So we conclude from the well-known case of Latimer's father ; Latimer, 
First Sermon before King Edward, in the Preface to the Northumberland 
Household Booh, p. xii. 

6 Stubbs, Const. Hist., III. xxi. p. 548. 7 lb. 8 lb. 



THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES 183 

coarse ; but he generally did his duty according to his 
light, and knew pretty thoroughly the needs and the busi- 
ness of his agricultural neighbours ; and when at last he was 
laid to rest in the village church where he had worshipped 
in pious but easy-going fashion all his days, he was probably 
regretted by the people of the manor far more than many 
a greater but less useful man. 

§ 114. The Yeomen. 

Next to the country gentry came that large and sturdy 
class of yeomen who, for some centuries, formed the real 
strength of English rural life. Their importance begins to 
be marked from the reign of Henry II. (1154-1189) on- 
wards, 1 but in the fifteenth century they had come more 
than ever to the front. They are recognised by the election 
act 2 of 1430 A.D., which conferred the county franchise on 
every " forty shilling freeholder," though forty shillings by 
no means represented the income of a substantial yeoman. 
Their ranks were strengthened, after the economic changes 
to which I have before alluded, by the newer class of 
tenant farmers, who now, together with the smaller owners 
and freeholders, made up what is called the yeomanry. 3 In 
this class there was every gradation of income, from that of 
the forty shilling freeholder to that of the rich tenant farmer, 
who rivalled perhaps the squire himself, though of course a 
freeholder might equally be a rich man and the tenant farmer 
barely worth a couple of pounds. The yeomanry, by the 
income and social position of its richer members, was con- 
nected with the gentry ; by its agricultural occupations, and 
by the poverty of the smaller tenants and freeholders, with 
the labourers and poorer tenants in villeinage. 4 Thus from 
baron to villein there was a closely-connected gradation of 
ranks, though the word " villein " had practically lost all its 
old significance, and after the reign of Eicharcl II. is never 
found in the Statute books. 5 Freeholder, tenant, and 

1 Stubbs, u. s., p. 552. 

2 The famous .statute 8 Henry VI., c. 7, which was not repealed till the 
14 Geo. III., c. 58. 

3 Stubbs, Const. Hist., III. xxi. p. 552. 4 lb., p. 554. 
5 Froude, Hist, of England, i. p. 12. 



1 84 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

villein alike were now merged into the yeomanry, except in 
those cases where a man had become merely an agricul- 
tural labourer. Politically, they were a very important 
element, for the forty shilling franchise must have included 
nearly all of them, and though the country gentry monopo- 
lised Parliamentary representation, their election depended 
on their yeoman constituents. 1 It was the yeomanry, 
too, who served on juries, chose the coroner, attended the 
sheriff's court, and assembled with arms which they them- 
selves provided in the muster of the forces of the shire 2 to 
follow their King, if need were, across the Channel, and win 
victory and glory for their leader on the battlefields of 
France. 3 

§ 115. Agriculture and Sheep- farming. 

The condition of the labourer we have seen already, and 
we may now therefore turn to the condition of the chief 
industry with which he was connected. Agriculture, as 
regards its methods, was still more or less stationary, but 
important changes were taking place, both among the tillers 
of the soil and in the uses to which the land was put. We 
have noticed the growth of the tenant farmer and yeoman 
and the emancipation of the villein, and now we note the 
appearance of the sheep farmer on a large scale. For his 
appearance in this century there was indeed more than one 
cause. In the first place, the silent but steady growth of 
home manufactures 4 since the days of Edward III. 5 had by 
this time begun to create a considerable home market for 
wool, in addition to the already existing market among the 
manufacturers of Flanders. That was no doubt the chief 
cause. But, besides this, sheep-farming offered to land- 
lords a cheaper and easier method of using their land than 
other branches of industry, from the fact that it required 

1 Stubbs, u. s., p. 557. 2 Stubbs, u. s., p. 552. 

3 Gf. the remarks on yeomanry in war in Green's History, i. p. 421. 

4 As Evidence of this growth we may quote from a treatise by Sir John 
Fortescue, Commodities of England (written some time before 1451), where 
he mentions English ' ' woollen cloth ready made at all times to serve the 
merchants of any two kingdoms." 

- 5 Above, p. 127. 



THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES 185 

comparatively little labour. This would be a great con- 
sideration, for labour had now become so dear, and the 
services of villeins so irregularly and rarely paid * since the 
great Revolt, that landowners were only too ready to turn 
to any industry where villein labour was not required. 
Hence we shall not be surprised to find a large increase of 
sheep-farming in the fifteenth century, an increase which 
caused foreigners to jest and English rhymers to lament, 
because (it was said) we cared more for sheep than for the 
ships of our navy. "Where are our ships, what are our 
swords become ? Our enemies bid us for a ship set a 
sheep," 2 was the cry, though, like most political cries, it 
was doubtless only partially true. Other complaints were 
uttered as time went on, especially as the enclosures of 
land made by landowners caused widespread distress in 
many districts, 3 and the wheat-growing interest of that day 
was sufficiently strong to induce the government to frame 
enactments which anticipated the Corn Laws of a later 
date. The wheat-growers, as opposed to the sheep-farmers, 
declared that their industry required encouragement, and 
complained that the price of wheat was too low. Whether 
there was very much truth in this outcry may be doubted, 
since at no time of our history has cheap bread roused 
anything but complaint in the British farmer's breast ; but, 
at any rate, the export of British corn was encouraged, 4 in 
contradiction of a still earlier policy, while the import of 
foreign corn was prohibited 5 unless the price of home- 
grown wheat was 6s. 8d. a quarter. In justice to the 
government, however, it should be added that mere pro- 
tection was not the only object of these Corn Laws, though, 

1 We find tenants in villeinage quitting the manor without leave, and 
tallages refused to the lords (Denton, Fifteenth Century, p. 113), nor were 
manorial dues paid : ' ' now they pay nothing " is the complaint ; cf. 
Blomfield's History of Launtoji, MS., quoted by Denton, u. s., p. 114. 

2 From the political poem (of about 1435) called The Libelle of English 
Policie, 36, 37. 

3 See below, p. 213. 

4 By the 17 Bichard II., c. 7 ; the 4 Henry VI., c. 5 ; and the 15 Henry 
VI., c. 2. Previously to this the 34 Edward III., c. 20, had prohibited 
the export. 

5 By the 3 Edward IV., c. 2. 



1 86 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

of course, they were passed by a Parliament at that time com- 
posed almost exclusively of landowners ; but that legislators 
sought to encourage thereby the growth of tillage as opposed 
to pasture in order that the rural population might not be 
compelled to leave the land. Not only for agricultural, but 
also for military reasons, it was important to prevent the 
depopulation of rural districts, which, in some cases, sheep- 
farming seemed to imply ; and therefore it is interesting 
to notice how " servants and labourers " were directed to 
practice with the bow and arrow on Sundays and holidays 
instead of playing football, dice, and skittles, and other 
unprofitable games. 1 

§ 116. The Stock and Land Lease. 

Apart from sheep-farming, however, and the consequent 
change from tillage to pasturage, 2 things went on much as 
before in agriculture, and very few changes were made. 
The " stock and land " lease system was still in operation, 
and we have a very good example of its working in the 
middle of the fifteenth century. 3 The example is from a 
farm at Alton Barnes in Wiltshire, in the year 1455 A.D. 
The rental was £14, and the "stock" includes corn, and 
both live and dead stock. The corn was valued at the 
price of the local market when the tenant took the farm 
over, being altogether £11, 8s. 6 Jd. ; the live stock con- 
sisted of 5 horses, 11 oxen, 3 cows and a bull, 2 heifers and 
2 yearlings, 571 sheep, and was valued at £64, 15s. 4Jd. ; 
and the dead stock came to £3, 15s. 2d., including farm 
implements and some household utensils. By the terms of 
the lease the tenant has to restore every article and animal 
enumerated (or its value) in good condition, though the 
landlord guarantees his tenant against any loss of sheep 
amounting to over 10 per cent, of their number. Sometimes 
this guarantee involved a severe loss to the landlord, 4 who 
also was responsible for repairs, trade losses, and "poor 
years," 5 so that perhaps it is not surprising that land- 

1 1 Richard II., c. 7. 2 Stubbs, Const. Hist., III. xxi. p. 611. 

3 Rogers, Hist. Agric, iii. 705-708. 

4 See example in Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 285. 6 lb., p. 286. 



THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES 187 

owners were not eager to give such leases if they could do 
better, and as time went on they fell into disuse. The 
value of land rose rapidly in the fifteenth century, 1 and 
people of good means and position were anxious to buy it 
for the sake of the social and other advantages it entailed, 2 
as well as for the profits derivable from wool growing. 
Rent, too, rose rapidly, 3 and the smaller tenants and yeomen 
began to feel the competition of large farmers and sheep 
breeders. But still the great mass of land was held in the 
old common fields, with their curiously intermixed strips 
belonging to different tenants, 4 and the great majority of 
the rural labourers had a piece of land, 5 either of their own 
or as a holding, wherefrom to supplement their wages. A 
landless labourer was not yet the rule, while most men 
could still feel themselves, in some measure at least, active 
and real sharers in the life of their village community. 
The old institutions of primitive days were not yet dead, 6 
though enclosures and legislation were soon to do their best 
to kill them. They were giving way to more modern 
requirements, but still they retained many relics of the 
past ; and though, undoubtedly, it is owing to their per- 
sistence that the slow progress of agricultural methods is 
due, and though it was necessary they should go, one cannot 
help regretting that the disintegration of the old village 
community took much of value and interest from the social 
side of the labourer's life. 

§ 117. The Towns and Town Constitutions. 

When we turn now from the country to the towns we 
find that here again the fifteenth century is marked by 

1 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 288. 

2 Cf. Stubbs, Const. Hist., III. xxi. pp. 610, 611. Among the advantages 
of landowners may be mentioned a lower rate of taxation, the county- 
franchise, legal protection from absolute forfeiture. Forfeited lands could 
be restored to the heirs of the dispossessed, whereas a merchant's property 
once forfeited was gone for ever. 3 See below, p. 213. 

4 The difficulties caused to landlords by this system are shown in 
mediaeval accounts. Cf. Rogers, Six Centuries, pp. 286, 287. 

5 Above, p. 177. 

6 Cf. Gomme, Village Community, ch. viii. , where instances of survivals 
of much later date are given. 



•y 



1 88 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

growth and change. It has been already remarked that it 
was not till the twelfth century that the towns have any 
independent municipal life as boroughs at all, 1 while even 
in the fourteenth century this municipal life was on a small 
scale ; 2 but in the fifteenth century wealth was accumulating 3 
and the towns growing more important, till, at the close 
of the period, they emerge in something very like their 
modern form as corporations. 4 If we take, for example, the 
period between the reigns of Henry III. (1216-1272) and 
Henry VII. (1488-1509) we find that the amount of 
growth is very considerable. In the earlier part of the 
period 5 the towns had indeed gained their charters, with 
the rights of holding their own courts under their own 
officers, the right of compounding for their payments to 
the crown in the shape of the firma burgi, 6 and collecting 
this among their citizens, and they had gained the recogni- 
tion of the merchant and craft gilds that had so important a 
share in their municipal life. But these rights and privileges 
were only a commencement of a growth towards a larger 
freedom. In the later years of the period we find that the 
typical constitution of the town is the modern one of a 
close corporation of mayor, aldermen, and council, 7 with 
more or less clearly defined organisation and precise 
numbers, and certainly with greater and more independent 
self-governing powers. The "bailiff" has been replaced 
by the " mayor," and the town constitution gains by the 
change a unity hitherto unknown ; the merchant and craft 
gilds have become merged into the corporation and take 
part in the municipal government; yet exactly how and 
when these changes took place it is most difficult to say. 
It is, however, very clear that the growth of towns and of 
civic constitutions throughout the country was exceeding 
varied and irregular. 8 There is no marked line of develop- 
ment ; sometimes the larger towns received their modern 
constitution long before the smaller ; and altogether there 
is great diversity of growth. There is not space here to 

1 Mrs Green, Town Life, i. p. 11. 2 lb., i. p. 13. 

3 lb., i. p. 15. 4 Stubbs, Const. Hist., III. xxi. p. 560. 

5 lb., p. 559. 6 Above, pp. 90, 93. 

7 Stubbs, u. s., p. 560. 8 Ashley, Econ. Hist., II. i. p. 11. 



THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES 189 

discuss the question fully, nor is it necessary for our pur- 
pose. It is sufficient to note the development of the 
towns, and, consequently, of town life, in the fifteenth cen- 
tury, as the beginning of that tendency towards urban 
attraction which is, perhaps unfortunately, a necessary 
characteristic of modern industrial progress. But we 
may devote a passing mention to the connection of the 
gilds and municipal life. 

§ 118. The Gilds and Municipal Institutions. 

The story of the relations of the merchant gilds to the 
municipal government on the one hand, and to the craft 
gilds on the other, is exceedingly complex. 1 Sometimes 
merchant gilds regarded the craft gilds as rivals, and 
attempted to suppress them, while at others they sought a 
surer means of regulating them by including them in their 
own body. 2 But in the fifteenth century the craft gilds 
were beginning to decay, at least in the older corporate 
towns, and were ceasing to be really effective institutions 
for the wellbeing of the crafts which they professed to 
regulate. 3 Consequently we need not be surprised at their 
practical destruction by Somerset in the next century 
(1545). But the merchant gilds had in many cases 
become identified with the corporation or governing body of 
the town to which they belonged, and regulated trade in 
much the same fashion as before, 4 though trade was now 
assuming so much larger proportions that it was outgrowing 
the powers of the regulating bodies. In some cases the 
name of " merchant gild " died out, as at York, but even 
then the custom of admitting " freemen " as citizens was 
exercised, as at Leicester, by the corporation in such a way 
as to show that the admission was a relic of the powers of 
the ancient gild. 5 In other places, however, the name 
and idea of the gild was still preserved, and furnished 
occasions for city pageants of considerable splendour. 6 But 
for all practical purposes the merchant gilds had now be- 

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist. III. xxi. p. 562. 3 Stubbs, u. s., p. 563. 

3 Cunningham, i. p. 464. 4 Stubbs, u. s., p. 564. 

5 lb. 6 As at Preston ; Stubbs, u. s. , p. 565. 



190 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

come identified with the town corporations, and even the gild 
" halls " had become the common hall or " town hall " of the 
city. 1 The aldermen of the gild became the aldermen of 
town wards, and the property of the gild became the pro- 
perty of the town. 2 In London, however, the still existing 
" City Companies " represent not merchant but craft gilds, 
of which the twelve most important availed themselves in 
the fourteenth century of the power to grant livery to 
their members, and were then, and are still, distinguished 
as the Livery Companies. 3 

§ 119. The Decay of Certain Towns. 

It will be seen from this' short summary, therefore, that 
it is to the growth of industry that we owe the development 
of our town life and municipal self-government, and that it 
is in industrial history that the origin of the towns of 
to-day must be sought. In later years towns take an 
important share in political history, as well as industrial, 
but in the period with which we are now dealing it was not 
so. They did not play, either in or out of Parliament, an 
important part in the dynastic struggles of the fifteenth 
century. 4 Probably they were too much occupied with the 
anxieties and responsibilities of their own development to 
care much about outside politics, for we must remember 
that in mediaeval England the life both of town and village 
was very self-centred, and neither citizens or villagers had 
much interest in affairs outside their own boundaries. In 
any case, many of the English towns at this time seem to 
have been in a somewhat depressed condition from the 
industrial point of view, however much they might be 
advancing municipally and socially. \The older corporate 
towns seem to have decayed 5 towards the end of the 
fifteenth century, however prosperous they may have been 
at its beginning, and early in the reign of Henry VIII. 6 it 

1 Stubbs, u. s., p. 565. One might cite the example of the Nottingham 
"Gild Hall," which is the name still given to the quite modern building 
used as a town hall. 

2 Stubbs, u. s., p. 566. 3 lb., pp. 566, 567. 4 Stubbs, u. s., p. 592. 
5 This is evident from the remissions of taxation on towns made in 1496. 

Rot. Pari., vi. 514, 438. 6 Statute 3 Henry VIII., c. 8. 



THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES 191 

is officially noted that " many and the most part of the 
cities, burghs, and towns corporate within this realm of Eng- 
land be fallen into ruin and decay." At first sight this 
would seem rather a startling condition of things, and, in 
fact, one that is almost inexplicable in view of the growth 
of industry and commerce which we know to have taken place 
in this age. But the explanation is not far to seek. First of 
all, we note that the complaint is made only of the old and 
corporate towns, and that many newer towns were growing 
up and flourishing with prosperous manufactures. This was 
certainly the case with Manchester, 1 Birmingham, 2 and 
(later) Sheffield ; 3 and also with the towns of Leeds, Wake- 
field, and others in the West Biding of Yorkshire. 4 | The 
fact is that the restrictions made by the gilds in these older 
towns rendered them obnoxious 5 to the new manufacturers 
who were everywhere springing up, and who preferred to 
leave the old cities and carry on their occupations undis- 
turbed elsewhere!^ tliga^ again, the heavy taxation necessi- 
tated by the wars of Henry VI. 's reign, and the unnecessary 
but heavy exactions of the grasping Henry VII., had fallen 
very hardly on the corporate towns, while others had 
escaped. 6 But still another cause, and one more powerful 
than either of these, may be assigned. 4t is that they were 
at the close of the fifteenth century no longer necessary as 
places of security for traders and manufacturers. 7 In the 
troublous days of the Wars of the Roses, and in the old times 
before them, when the nobility were constantly engaged in 
private warfare, it would not have been safe for a merchant 
or a manufacturer, or for anyone with much property and 
little power, 8 to have lived outside a walled town, as most 

1 Mentioned as a market in the Rot. Pari., vi. 182 a, in Edward IV. 's 
reign, but in 1542 mentioned in a statute of Edward VI. as a flourishing 
manufacturing town (5 and 6 Ed. VI. , c. 6). 

2 Described by Leland, Itinerary, iv. 114. 

3 A company of cutlers was formed here in Elizabeth's reign. 

4 Defoe, Plan of English Commerce, 127, 129, refers to these towns having 
woollen manufactures under Henry VII. 

5 Cf. Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. 452, 455, 461, and above, p. 146. 

6 lb., i. 461. 7 Cf. Froude's remarks, History, i. 9. 
8 For instances of oppression by great nobles, see Denton, Fifteenth 

Century, pp. 296-301, and the Paston Letters (ed. Arber), Vol. I. 13-15. 



192 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

of them then were. A master workman could not then 
have migrated with any safety into a country district, either 
to obtain water-power or to evade gild-made regulations. 
But now that the Wars of the Roses were over, and the Crown 
had proved strong enough to establish pea.ce arid security 
throughout the greater part of the kingdom, one great use of 
the older towns as centres of security for manufactures and 
trade had become unnecessary ; they begin to decline in 
importance, though commerce and industry are progressing ; 
while newer centres take their place, or urban industrial 
occupations are spreading even into rural districts. Thus the 
pacification of the kingdom, which was the work of Henry 
VII. and the Tudors, and which has lasted with but one 
serious outbreak into our own times, prevented what might 
otherwise have happened too prematurely, namely, that con- 
centration of population into the towns which is one of the 
greatest difficulties of the present age. 

§120. The Commercial and Industrial Changes 
of the Fifteenth Century. 

Meanwhile, as we have hinted, manufactures and com- 
merce in the fifteenth century, in spite of the decay of 
certain towns, were certainly progressing. The woollen 
manufacture received a great impetus from Henry VII., 
who, as Edward III. had done, encouraged foreigners to 
settle in England in order to instruct English artisans. 1 
He directed his attention specially to the West Riding of 
Yorkshire and the towns of Leeds, Wakefield, and Halifax ; 
and about the same time the export of wool 2 was for- 
bidden in order that there might be plenty of material 
for making woollen cloth. In the East of England, Nor- 
wich and the county of Norfolk 3 generally still remained a 
flourishing seat of manufactures both of woollen and worsted 

1 Defoe, Plan of English Commerce, 127, 129. 

2 4 Henry VII., c. 11. The fact that it was again prohibited by the 22 
Henry VIII. , c. 2, and the 37 Henry VIII., c. 15, shows that either the 
prohibition was useless or that it was only temporary. 

3 Gf. the information implied in the Statutes 5 Henry VIII., c. 4, and 14 
and 15 Henry VIII. , c. 3. 



THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES 193 

stuffs. There was an active export trade in wool to Italian x 
as well as to Flemish towns, and other foreign commerce 
was being entered into that was to lead to great develop- 
ments in the future. 2 / In fact, the fifteenth century shows 
us remarkable progress. It is the beginning in many ways 
of a new era in more than one branch of industry. For 
there were at least three great changes that form in them- 
selves a commercial and industrial revolution, almost as 
important in some ways, though not so striking, as the 
industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. This 
series of developments was : (1) the change in agriculture, 
already commented upon, 3 from tillage to pasturage for the 
sake of wool-growing; (2) the change from England being 
merely a wool-growing to a wool-manufacturing country 4 ; 
and (3) the change in foreign commerce, 5 whereby English- 
men, who in the days of Edward III. had allowed nearly all 
their foreign commerce to be monopolised by foreign mer- 
chants, now began to take it into their own hands. Nor 
should we omit, as factors of considerable importance,, the 
great discoveries made at this time by Columbus and Cabot, 
though at first these discoveries had but little effect upon 
English commerce. Henry VII., indeed, seems to have had 
more foresight in this matter than most of his subjects, for 
he more than once granted commissions for the discovery 
and investment of new lands. 6 It was not his fault that 
England did not take the place of Spain in the New World 7 ; 
but Englishmen were not yet ready for such an enterprise, 
and perhaps it was as well that they were not. Their 
success was all the greater for its delay. 

1 Namely, Pisa, Venice, and Florence ; Rynier, Fosdera, XII. 390. 

2 E.g. English merchants are now found (1513) doing business in the 
Levant, to which they had never traded before. Cf. Cunningham, i. p. 
438, which see also for the development of shipping and foreign commerce 
generally. 

3 Above, p. 184. 

4 Cf. Mrs Green, Town Life in Fifteenth Century, i. p. 44. 
5 Ib.,i. p. 122. 

6 Besides his patronage of Cabot (cf. Rymer. Fosdera, XII. 595) he 
granted patents of exploration in 1501 and later to various Bristol mer- 
chants [ib. XIII. 41 and 37). 

7 Burrows, Commentaries on the History of England, p. 252, puts it thus. 
Others are inclined to think Henry might have done more than he did. 

N 



194 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

§ 121. The Close of the Middle Ages. 

The close of the 15th century brings us to the close ot 
the Middle Ages. Henceforth we are treading on modern 
ground, and industry also begins to develope under more 
modern ideas. The old order changes and the new grows 
gradually into its place, till at length we of the nineteenth 
century look back upon mediaeval life as upon something 
not quite akin to ours. We feel ourselves more in touch 
with the men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 
than with those of the fourteenth, and naturally so, for 
there is perhaps a greater gulf fixed between the days of 
Edward III. and Elizabeth than between the days of 
Elizabeth and Victoria. The old manorial and feudal land 
system was dying out ; the old ideas of regulating crafts, 
trade, and commerce were giving way to wider and 
looser methods, more competitive than heretofore, and of 
more national comprehensiveness. Merchants were begin- 
ning to look beyond the confines of the narrow seas to the 
riches of the gorgeous East and to the newly found lands 
of the mysterious West. Industry was shaking off the 
bonds and trammels of local regulations ; the labourer of 
the manor no longer feared the authority of his lord, nor the 
artisan of the town the censure of his gild. Social life also 
was changing and with it political life as well. The Wars 
of the Roses had destroyed the great nobles of the past, 
and now the royal power rested chiefly upon the goodwill 
of the middle classes. 1 The ideal of this class was a king 
who would act as a superior kind of chief constable 2 who, 
by keeping the great men in order would allow their 
inferiors to make money in peace. Such a king was found 
in Henry VII. It was not perhaps a very high ideal, but 
it was practically possible, and under Henry VII. the 
middle classes prospered. Nor were the lower classes as 
far as we have been able to judge, less fortunate. 
Poverty and crime existed, as unfortunately they always 
will, and there were Poor Laws 3 with penal codes to 

1 Cf. Gardiner, Student's History, i. 357. 2 76., i. 331. 

3 Stubbs, Const. Hist., iii. xxi., pp. 599 and 600, points out how the 
alms-giving of the clergy, the monasteries and the gilds, as well as general 



THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES 195 

meet them. But poverty was neither so deep nor so 
widespread as it is now, nor as it soon became, and the 
monasteries and gilds (when they did their duty) were 
possibly quite as efficient as a modern Board of Guardians. 
On the whole, then, the fifteenth century was a period 
of prosperity and content, in spite of both civil and foreign 
wars ; and even the wasteful reign of Henry VI., with its 
unsuccessful wars with France, 1 and huge subsidies to carry 
them on, 2 though it made the Government unpopular and 
caused widespread national discontent and occasional insur- 
rections in Kent and Wiltshire, 3 did not materially injure 
the general welfare. The king himself, however, was 
nearly bankrupt. 4 The Wars of the Roses which followed 
(1455-86) do not seem to have affected the country at 
large very much, being mostly fought in a series of much 
exaggerated skirmishes by small bodies of nobles and their 
followers. 5 So, at least, one might infer from the small 
effect they had upon wages and prices. 6 They ended in 

charity sufficed for the necessities of the poor. Most of the legislation on 
the subject was directed against idleness and random begging. The 
statutes of 1388, 1495 and 1504 were among the first attempts at a law of 
settlement and organised relief. But these acts refer only to professional 
mendicants, (including pilgrims, friars, and even University scholars) and 
it is probable that for the poor who remained at home and were not 
vagrants no such legislation was needed {ib. p. 603). It was vagrancy 
more than unrelieved poverty that was the cause of legislation. 

1 For this war cf. the useful summary in Burrows Commentaries on the 
Hist, of Eng.y pp. 215-221 and Green, History of the English People, i. pp. 
547-563. 

2 Cf. Stubbs, Const. Hist., iii., pp. 86-125. 

3 This was the rebellion under Cade, in Kent, (June 1450). It was purely 
political and has no such social significance as the Revolt of 1381. See 
Stubbs, Const. Hist., iii. xviii. p. 150. In Wiltshire the Bishop of Salis- 
bury was murdered. Ib. p. 152. 

4 Ib. pp. 117 and 144. 

5 ' ' Happily a war of barons and their retainers rather than of the nation 
generally. The towns suffered but little." Burrows, Commentaries, p. 222. 
On the other hand, Denton, Fifteenth Century, p. 115, says that the Wars 
of the Roses were of a most devastating character, and that one-tenth of the 
population were killed. If so, it is extraordinary that so little effect is 
noticeable in manorial accounts. The statements of the Chroniclers as to 
numbers slain must be received in this case, as in that of the Black Death, 
with the utmost caution. 

6 Rogers, Six Centuries, pp. 332-334. "It had no bearing on work and 
wages," (p. 334) 



196 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

the ruin of the majority of the feudal aristocracy, 1 and 
at the same time opened a further path for the influence of 
the industrial classes, whose favour Henry VII. had the 
wisdom to court, and in return was supported by them in 
his policy of weakening the power of the great barons. 
He encouraged commerce, 2 and secured peace for his king- 
dom while gaining by rather dubious methods consider- 
able wealth for his treasury. 3 In his reign the nation 
prospered, 4 and the Middle Ages came to a close in a 
progressive and industrious England (1500 A.D.). 

But before the next century was completed great changes 
had taken place, one class at least had received a severe 
blow, and some of the worst difficulties of modern days had 
already begun. 

1 For the mutual destruction of the nobles cf. Gairdner, Lancaster and 
York, p. 227. It is quite true, however, as Denton remarks (Fifteenth 
Century, p. 261) that the wealth of the few who remained was greatly- 
increased, e.g. the peers Buckingham, Northumberland and Norfolk. 

2 E.g. by his treaties with Denmark in 1490 (Kymer, Foedera, xii. 381) 
with Florence (ib. xii. 390) in the same year, and the " Intercursus magnus " 
with Flanders in 1496, {ib. xii. 578). 

3 He had as much as £1,800,000. Gardiner, Student's History of England, 
i. 357. 

4 One proof of prosperity is that the nation could never have stood the 
burden of the French Wars as it did unless it had been fairly prosperous. 
Another proof is the growth of sheep -farming, which, as said above, in- 
dicates growing manufactures. Yet a third is the making of commercial 
treaties, as mentioned in note 2. 

SPECIAL NOTE. 

A study of the map opposite, showing the distribution of wealth in the 
various counties at the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth 
century, will give a clear idea of the general state of the country. The 
wealthiest counties were, at this period, nearly all agricultural ; while the 
north and north-western counties, now so rich, were then among the 
poorest. Compare the maps opposite pp. 263, 350, and 454. 



DISTRIBUTION 
OF WEALTH IN 

ENGLAND. 

I 503. 



NOFtsTH 
SEA 




Scale of English Miles 

O 10 20 BO +0 50 76 lOO 



-so' 



WEALTH !N ENGLAND IN 1503, 

This Map is based on the assessment of counties made in 1503 by Henry VII., for a" speciaJ 
"aid." The table of counties in order of their assessment will be found in Rogers' Hist. Agric, iv. 89. 
The basis adopted is the. number of acres to every £1 of assessment, the richer counties thus having 
the least number of acres to the £1. 

1. Counties with 200— 500 acres, per £1 
„ 500- 700 



3. „ „- 700- 850 

4. „ „ 850-1.150 
„ 1,150-2,200 
„ over 2,200 

Note. — This Map should be compared with that opposite page 263. 



Dark Brown. 
Dark Green. 
Dark Red. 
Light Brown. 
Light Red. 
Light Green. 



PERIOD IV 

FROM THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY TO THE EVE 

OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 

(1509-1760) 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII., AND ECONOMIC CHANGES IN 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 

§ 122. Henry VIII.'s Wastefulness. 

Henry VIII. came to the throne in 1509. He succeeded 
to a full treasury * left by his thrifty but grasping father, 
who had replenished it by exactions from the general pros- 
perity of the country at the close of the fifteenth century. 
But he soon dissipated the whole of these 'accumulations. 
He spent a great deal of money in subsidising the Emperor 
Maximilian, 2 and in interfering in foreign affairs, in which 
he was not very successful, in the hope of winning for him- 
self a military reputation and a leading place in the ranks 
of European powers. 3 His continental wars and alliances 
cost him dear, or rather they cost the English people dear, 
for he not only exhausted the patience of Parliament by 
his requests, but had recourse to other exactions in the 
shape of benevolences and fines. 4 His apologists have 
endeavoured to prove that personally Henry VIII. was not 
extravagant, and that his personal expenses did not greatly 
exceed those of his somewhat penurious parent. 5 But the 

1 See note 3 above, p. 196. 2 Green, History of English People, ii. 109. 

3 It has been pointed out that he realised this ambition and raised Eng- 
land to "the first rank among European nations" (Burrows, Commentaries, 
p. 253), and that his foreign policy connected England with the Continent 
to the advantage of commerce and the middle classes (p. 257). But no one 
can deny that he spent money recklessly in so doing, and it may be doubted 
whether the ultimate result was worth this vast expenditure. 

4 He had exhausted the treasury and subsidies very early by his French 
wars, 1513-1514 a.d., though at the conclusion he got a large sum of money 
from the French king, Annals of England, p. 288. Cf Green, History, 
ii. 93. " The millions left by his father were exhausted, his subjects had 
been drained by repeated subsidies." For the later attempts to obtain 
money, especially in 1523 and 1525, cf Green, ii. 116, 117, 121, 122. 

5 Cf. Froude, History, i. 39, who says Henry YIL's expenses were a little 
over £14,000 a year, out of which were defrayed the whole cost of the 
king's establishment, expenses of entertaining foreign ambojssadors, main - 

J .9<? 



200 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

fact remains that he managed to spend all his father's 
accumulations, over a million and three-quarters sterling, 
before he had been on the throne many years, 1 that he had 
to repudiate his debts, 2 that he was addicted to gambling 
in private 3 as well as to spending the nation's money reck- 
lessly in public, and that he left to his unfortunate young 
son Edward VI. a treasury not only exhausted of cash but 
burdened with unpaid debts. 4 Nor can it be denied that 
he roused open revolt by his attempts to obtain funds by 
ordinary methods ; 5 and it was probably the difficulties which 
he found in raising money by taxation that formed a very 
strong incentive for his spoliation of the monasteries and 
debasement of the currency. No doubt some excuse is to 
be found for Henry's enormous expenditure in the necessi- 
ties of foreign politics and the wars with France and Scot- 
land, but even in time of peace his expenditure seems to 
have been extravagant. The cost of his household estab- 
lishments, and those of his children, was simply enormous ; 
for the establishments of Mary, Edward, and even Elizabeth 
were each more costly than the whole annual charge of his 
father's household. 6 His extravagance was monumental, 

tenance of the Yeomen of the Guard, retinues of servants, and all outlay 
not connected with public business. Under Henry VIII. these expenses 
were £19,894, 16s. 8d., equal to some £240,000 of our money. But the 
question remains, where did all the money go that Henry VIII. obtained 
by various means ? It has never been properly accounted for, and these 
household accounts evidently do not represent his entire expenditure. 

1 Gf. Green, ii. 93, where the reference is to 1514 a.d. 

2 By the 35 Henry VIII., c. 12, "all loans made to the king were 
remitted and released," and the creditors got nothing. Froude, iv. 13, is 
"unable to see the impropriety of this proceeding," apparently regarding 
it as only another form of taxation. But the creditors must have thought 
differently. 

3 Gf. the note in Froude, History, i. 30, and the Privy Purse Expenses of 
Henry VIII. 

4 Gf. Froude, History, v. 119-123, who details the exhaustion of the 
Treasury early in Edward VI. 's reign and Northumberland's desperate 
attempts to fill it. 

5 As in the revolts of 1525 in Suffolk and Kent (Green, History, ii. 122), 
when a tenth was demanded from all the laity and a fourth from the 
clergy. The royal demand for money had to be abandoned, Annals of 
England, p. 293. 

6 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 321 ; Hist. Agric, iv. 28. The accounts are 
preserved in the Record Office. 



THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII 201 

though where his money went he could not himself dis- 
cover. Wolsey said of him, " Rather than miss any part of 
his will, he will endanger one half of his kingdom." x As a 
matter of fact he succeeded in impoverishing the whole of it. 2 
Nevertheless, it is curious to notice that Henry VIII. 
did not by any means entirely lose the popularity of 
his subjects. He was certainly feared, but he was also 
loved, and even remained popular in spite of his treatment 
of his wives and the debasement of the currency. 3 It has 
shrewdly been remarked that this was because he under- 
stood his people thoroughly, knowing exactly how far he 
could go and how much they would bear. 4 But even with- 
out this, though it is probably a very true explanation of the 
matter, his popularity need cause no surprise to any one who 
understands the relations of king and people and realises the 
combined ignorance and superficiality of the mass of man- 
kind. A very cursory glance at history shows us that the 
best rulers have not always been the most popular ; 5 that 
even Nero had his supporters ; and that during a prince's 
lifetime the outside populace have only the very faintest 
knowledge of what goes on inside a court, while they base 
their fluctuating affections or dislikes upon the casual public 
appearances of a monarch and the untrustworthy rumours 
which, even in the most democratic country, are the utmost 
that is allowed to penetrate beyond a privileged Court 
circle. Moreover, after he had seen how his exactions had 
angered his people in 1525, Henry took care in future to 
obtain money by means quite as effectual, but more under- 
hand, and thus avoided another popular outbreak. But 
the fact of his popularity need not detain us. It does 
not alter the other facts of his cruelty, selfishness, and 
robbery. 

1 Quoted by Green, History, i. 88. 

2 Even Froude admits this, for he records " the general distress " at 
beginning of Edward VI. 's reign (iv. 352) owing to the base money and 
other causes. He admits that Henry's household expenses had doubled 
since the beginning of his reign (iv. 251). 

3 Burrows, Commentaries on the History of England, p. 276. 

4 lb. 

5 E.g. William III. of England; cf. Macaulay's History, ch. xi., and 
passim. 



202 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

§ 123. The Dissolution of the Monasteries. 

Having wasted the carefully accumulated treasures of his 
father, Henry sought for further supplies. They were 
gained at first by increased taxation, but as this money was 
spent in the French wars, 1 Henry was soon in difficulties 
again. Then a great temptation came upon him. The 
monasteries 2 suggested themselves to him as an easy prey, 
and he knew that an attack upon them would not displease 
the growing Protestant party in the country. It is possible 
that he was even animated by reforming zeal, and, if so, it 
was fortunate that he was able to satisfy his conscience and 
to fill his purse at the same moment. The religious houses 
were in many cases certainly not fulfilling their ancient 
functions properly, 3 and were often far from being the homes 
of religious virtue. 4 Excuses and even reasons were easily 
found; in 1536 the smaller monasteries with an income 
below £200 a year were suppressed, 5 and in 1539 the 
larger ones were similarly treated. 6 In all, about a 
thousand houses were suppressed, 7 the annual income of 
which was some £160,000, equivalent to more than two 
millions sterling of our present money. 8 Half a dozen 
bishoprics and a few grammar schools were founded, some 
fortifications built, and temporary work found for the 
unemployed out of the proceeds of this spoliation, 9 in order 
to blind the eyes of the people at large. But with these 

1 Green, History, ii. 93. 

2 Reforms had been instituted among the clergy before this, even in 
Henry VII. 's reign. Cf. Froude, History, i. 97-99 

% E.g. The duty of relieving the poor is said to have been neglected. 
Froude, i. 76. For other charges see ib. ii. 302, sqq. 

4 Cf. the state of things at the Lichfield Nunnery, Froude, ii. 319 ; at Foun- 
tains Abbey, where the Abbot kept six women, ib. p. 321, and c. x. generally. 

5 By the Act 27 Henry VIII. c. 28. 6 Act 31 Henry VIII. c. 13. 

7 Green, History, ii. 101 gives 1021 altogether. Bishop Creighton {Diet. 
Eng. History, s.v. Monasticism) gives only 616 as the total. "There were 
186 Benedictines, 173 Augustinians, 101 Cistercians, 33 of the four orders 
of friars, 32 Premonstratensians, 28 of the Knights Hospitallers, 25 Gil- 
bertines, 20 Cluniacs, 9 Carthusians, and a few other orders. The total 
number of monasteries was 616, and their revenues were approximately 
valued at £142,914 yearly." 

8 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 322, Hist. Agric. iv. 29. 

9 Green, History, ii. 201 ; Froude, History, ii. 345, iii. 207-10. 



THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII 203 

paltry exceptions the whole of that vast capital and revenue 
was granted to courtiers and favourites, sold at nominal 
prices, or frittered away by the king and his satellites. 1 

§ 124. Results of the Suppression. 

Although the mass of the people did not protest very 
vigorously against this piece of royal robbery, many of them 
witnessed with silent dismay the destruction of ancient insti- 
tutions that had taken at one time an important share in 
the national life. It is true that the monasteries had, so to 
speak, worn themselves out and outgrown their usefulness. 2 
Some were deeply in debt, some almost deserted, almost all 
had misapplied their revenues. 3 Some reform, at least, was 
necessary, perhaps even a total suppression, but undoubtedly 
the worst feature about the whole transaction was the dis- 
tribution of the spoil. 4 In any case the country districts, 
if none other, lost in many instances (though not in all) 
hospitable and charitable friends ; and discontent, eagerly 
fomented of course by the dispossessed monks, 5 broke out 
into open insurrection. The well-known revolt called the 
Pilgrimage of Grace (1536) was an instance of this, though 
it had also other causes, connected with the general agrarian 
change which was then taking place. These causes may be 
detailed in the words of those concerned in the rebellion, 
words which give a very clear insight into the grievances 
that were vexing men's minds in the rural districts : " The 
poor people and commons," said one, " be sore oppressed by 
gentlemen because their living is taken away." 6 This is 
vague, but another witness tells us more explicitly in what 
the oppression consisted. He mentions " the pulling down 
of villages and farms, raising of rents, enclosures, intakes of 
the commons, worshipful men taking yeomen's offices, that 
is, becoming dealers in farm produce. 7 " One great reason 

x Many of the new aristocracy of Henry VIII. 's reign owe their riches 
to this spoliation. "The Rusaells and Cavendishes rose from obscurity 
through the grants of church lands." Green, History, ii. 201. 

2 Burrows, Commentaries, p. 270. * lb. 

4 /6.,p. 271. 5 Ib., 272. 

6 Evidence of Geo. Gisborne, Rolls House, MSS., miscellaneous, first 
series, 132 (Froude). 7 William Stapleton's evidence, ib. 



204 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

I 

of the discontent is thus clearly seen to be the e nclos ures, 
and another was the raising of rents ; and grievances like 
these, coupled with religious feeling, fear of change, and 
sympathy for the dispossessed monks, were sufficient to 
give rise to a very considerable outbreak, which was only 
suppressed with some difficulty. 1 The economic disturbances 
which resulted, though not so clearly seen, were far more 
severe. They were acute enough from the mere fact of so 
much wealth having suddenly changed hands and being 
spent with reckless prodigality. It is said that one-fifth, 2 
or even one-third, 3 of the land in the kingdom was held by 
the monasteries, and this was now transferred from the hold 
of the Church into the hands of a new set of nobles and 
landed gentry, created from the dependants and followers of 
Henry's court. 4 These were enriched, but the former 
tenants of the monasteries and the poorer class of labourers 
suffered greatly. 5 Hence serious results followed. Many 
of the monastic lands were held by tenants upon the stock 
and land lease system, 6 spoken of before ; but, when these 
monastic lands were suddenly transferred into the clutches 
of Henry's new and grasping nobility, or were bought by 
merchants and mauufacturers who only cared for profits, 7 
the stock was confiscated and sold off, while the money rent 
was raised. The new owners did not care for the slow, 
though really lucrative, system of providing the tenant with 
a certain amount of stock for his land, but simply wished 
to get all the money they could without delay. They often 
evicted the tenantry and lived as absentees on the profits of 
their flocks. 8 The result was that the poorer tenants were 

1 Annals of England, p. 302, 303. 2 Green, History, ii. 201. 

3 Rogers, Hist. Agric, iv. 113; Six Centuries, p. 323, who however 
seems to think it rather doubtful. 

4 Cf. Froude, History, iii. 206, where he mentions the novi homines. 

5 Cf. the contemporary evidence in the Cole MSS. (Brit. Museum) xii. 
fol. 5. The Fall of Religious Houses : ' ' They never raised any rent nor 
took any incomes or fines of their tenants." Again, " If any poor house- 
holder lacked seed to sow his land, or bread, corn, or malt before harvest, 
and came to a monastery, he should not have gone away again without 
help." Of course, some allowance must be made for the evident friendly 
bias of the author. 

6 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 323. 7 Froude, History, iii. p. 206. 
8 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. p. 434. 



THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII 205 

almost ruined, and it seems fairly evident that pauperism 
was much increased. 

§ 125. Pauperism. 

Whether it is true that the monasteries relieved what 
poverty there was, or not, or whether in pre- Reformation 
days the charitable instincts of the general public were 
more actively encouraged l by their religion, may still be a 
matter of dispute, but there can be no doubt as to the 
growth of pauperism in the days of Henry VIII. Of course 
it had existed before, and measures had been passed for its 
relief, 2 but henceforth it becomes a more noticeable pheno- 
menon, and its difficulties increase instead of diminishing. 
Its growth was due to the agrarian difficulties of the six- 
teenth century, especially to the enclosures, and perhaps in 
some measure to that peculiarly modern development of society 
by which, as the wealth of the nation increases, it seems to 
become vested in fewer hands, while the numbers of the 
poor increase with the accumulation of riches. Be that as 
it may, legislation was found necessary before the suppres- 
sion of the monasteries, though the suppression must have 
given an impetus to the other already existing causes of 
trouble. Two acts were passed in the middle of Henry's 
reign. The first (1531) mentions the increase of "vaga- 
bonds and beggars," and the crimes they commit, and en- 
acts that the justices, mayors, and other authorities " shall 
make diligent search and inquiry of all aged poor and im- 
potent persons which live, or of necessity be compelled to 
live, by alms of the charity of the people " ; that they then 
shall only allow them to beg, after giving them a proper 
license to do so, within certain limits, while begging outside 
such limits, or without permission, was to be punished by 
imprisonment in the stocks and by whipping. 3 The second 
Act (1536), evidently framed because the first was unsatis- 
factory, forbids private persons to give money to beggars, but 
makes provision for a charity organisation fund, to be col- 
lected by the church wardens on Sundays and holidays in 

1 Froude, History, i. 77, and cf. iv. 355. 

2 Above, p. 194, note 3. 3 The 22 Henry VIII., c. 12. 



206 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

the churches. The parish priest was to keep an account of 
receipts and expenditure. All idle children, over five years 
of age, were to be appointed " to matters of husbandry, or 
other craft or labour to be taught." But for the " sturdy 
vagabond " there was no mercy ; if found begging a second 
time, he was to be mutilated by the loss of the whole or 
part of his right ear ; if caught a third time, to be put to 
death " as a felon and an enemy of the commonwealth." x 
So the law remained for sixty years ; unrepealed through 
the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary; reconsidered, but again 
formally passed, under Elizabeth. " It was the express con- 
viction of the English nation that it was better for a man 
not to live at all than to live a profitless and worthless 
life." 2 But the simple, if sanguinary, measures of the 
Tudor age were found in later days to be insufficient to 
cure an evil of which simplicity is unfortunately far from 
being a characteristic. 

§ 126. The Issuing of Base Coin. 

A few years after the dissolution of the monasteries, 
Henry was in difficulties again. He dared not ask his 
Parliament for further supplies so soon after his last piece 
of plunder, and therefore he betook himself to a still more 
underhand kind of robbery. In 1527 he had begun to 
debase the currency, 3 and now he repeated this criminal 
action in 1543, 1545, and 1546. 4 The process was con- 
tinued by the guardians of Edward VI., till an almost in- 
credible amount of alloy was added to the coins. Already, 
in 1549, the debasement had reached six ounces of alloy 
in the pound of silver ; but in 1551 there were nine ounces, 
a pound of this base mixture being coined into seventy-two 
shillings. 5 This debasement forms a landmark in English 
industrial history, almost as noticeable as events like the 

1 The 27 Henry VIII., c. 25. 2 Froude, History, i. 88. 

\j 3 Cunningham, i. 482. He coined a pound of silver of the old touch into 
45s. in 1527. See Dr Cunningham's strong remarks on the iniquity of the 
Tudor kings. 

4 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 342. In 1543 the debasement was 2 ounces 
of alloy in 12, in 1545 it was 6, in 1546 it was 8. The coinage was re- 
formed by Elizabeth. Cf. Hist. Agric, iv. 186-200. 

5 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 343. 



THE REIGN OF HEXRY VIII 207 

first Poor Law or the Plague. Its effect was not felt im- 
mediately, but it was none the less real. 1 The chief point 
that concerned the labourer was that prices rapidly rose, 
but that, as is always the case., the rise of wages did not 
coincide with this inflation, and when they did rise, they 
did not do so in a fair proportion. The necessaries of life 
rose in proportion of one to two and one-half ; wages, 
when they finally rose, only in the proportion of one to one 
and one-half. 2 "When too late, it was recognised that the 
issue of base money was the cause of dearth in the realm, 
and Latimer lamented the fact in his sermons. Meanwhile, 
the mischief had been done. 

The government was almost bankrupt, and when Henry 
VIII. died he bequeathed to his young son, instead of the 
magnificent fortune which his own father had amassed, a 
treasury not only empty, but completely overwhelmed in 
debt. 3 These debts were augmented by the " wilful govern- 
ment " of the Duke of Somerset, while the council of nobles 
who surrounded the youthful Edward only made matters 
worse by their unpatriotic rapacity. 

§ 127. The Confiscation of the Gild Lands. 

In the very first year of Edward's reign a fresh piece of 
robbery was carried out. This was the confiscation of all 
chantries and gild lands, planned by Henry VIII. 4 but 
executed by the Protector Somerset. All lands belonging 
to "colleges, chantries, and free chapels," were in 1547 
given to the king, 5 and it was professed by the Act that 
their revenues would be given to the establishment of 

1 Rogers. Six Countries, p. 34-4. 

2 lb., p. 345; cf. also Froude, History, v. 95. "The measure of corn 
that was wont to be sold at 2s. or 3s. was at 6s. Sd. in March 1551, and 
30s. in March 1552. A row that had been worth 6s. Sd. sold for 40s." 

3 See Northumberland's letter to the Council ; MSS. Domestic, Edward 
VI., vol. xv. (Froude), where he speaks of '"'the great debts wherein, for 
one great part, he [Edward VI.] was left by his Highnesse's father, and 
augmented by the wilful government of the late Duke of Somerset, who 
took upon him the Protectorship and government of his own authority." 
Of course Northumberland's evidence is not altogether unprejudiced. 

4 In the Act 37 Henry VIII., c. 17. cf. Froude, Hi-story, iv.. p. 193. 

5 By the Act 1 Edw. VI., c. 14. 



208 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

grammar schools, the maintenance of vicarages, and the 
support of preachers. Some portion was so applied — pro- 
bably to salve the consciences of the spoilers — but by far 
the greater part was shared among the members of the govern- 
ment or devoted to pay off some of the late King's debts. 1 
A portion of the lands so confiscated was the property of 
the craft-gilds both in town and country, having been 
acquired partly by bequests from members, and partly by 
purchase from the funds of the gilds. The revenues derived 
from them were used for lending, without usury, to poorer 
members of the gilds, for apprenticing poor children, for 
widows' pensions, and, above all, for the relief of destitute 
members of the craft. 2 Thus the labourer of that time had 
in the funds of the gild a kind of insurance money, while 
the gild itself fulfilled all the functions of a benefit society. 
Somerset procured the Act for suppressing them on the plea 
that these lands were associated with superstitious uses. 
Only the property of the London gilds was left untouched. 

The effects of this confiscation were felt perhaps indirectly 
more than directly, but were none the less serious. No 
doubt the landed property of the gilds was largely devoted 
to the maintenance of masses for departed members of the 
society, but assistance was also freely given to members 
in distress, to enable them to tide over hard times. 3 These 
institutions rather prevented men from falling into pauperism 
than actually relieved it to any great extent, 4 but the net 
result w r as of course much the same. Their suppression 
certainly must have helped to swell the number of unto- 
ward influences that combined at this period to depress the 
condition of the working classes. 

Why this abolition was not more generally resented is a 
point of some interest. In the first place, the lands of the 
religious gilds and craft gilds were confiscated together on 

1 Annals of England, pp. 316, 317. Froude, History, iv., p. 313, re- 
marks : " The carcase was cast out into the fields and the vultures of all 

breeds and orders flocked to the banquet." 

2 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 347; Hist. Agric, iv. 6. 

3 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i., p. 480. 

4 lb., p. 481 ; and cf. on the other hand Prof. Ashley's remarks in the 
Political Science Quarterly, vol. iv., No. 3, p. 402, who rather minimises 
the usefulness of the gilds. 



THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII 209 

the plea above mentioned, and thus the difference between 
them was confused in the eyes of the Protestant party 
then in the ascendant. Then, again, the London gilds 
were spared because of their power, 1 and thus it was made 
their interest not to interfere with the destruction of their 
provincial brethren. The nobles were bought off with 
presents gained from the funds of the gilds. Moreover, the 
craft gilds in the country towns were becoming close corpor- 
ations, whose advantages were often monopolised by a few 
powerful members. This led, as we saw, 2 to the manufac- 
ture of cloth spreading from the towns into industrial 
villages in the rural districts, where perhaps the mass of the 
population, not perceiving the full significance of the Act, did 
not object to a measure which struck a blow at the town 
" mysteries." 3 But, nevertheless, a great deal of discontent 
was aroused. Somerset became very unpopular and in- 
surrections broke out in many parts of the country, the 
most dangerous being in Cornwall, Devonshire, and Norfolk 
(1549). 4 They were caused not only by this spoliation but 
by agrarian discontent as well, added to religious distur- 
bances, but German and Italian mercenaries were introduced 
to put them down, 5 and the protests of the people were 
everywhere choked in their own blood. 

§128. Bankruptcy and Rapacity of Edward VI. 's 
Government. 

These insurrections serve to show the anger of the nation 
at the atrocious rapacity and misgovernment of the nobles 
who surrounded the boy-king Edward. And indeed the 
nation had a right to be angry. The government was 
practically bankrupt, 6 and had to resort to the most desper- 
ate measures to obtain money for immediate necessities. 
The currency had been so debased that they dare not debase 
it any further, and it only remained to acknowledge the 
fact openly, to throw the burden of it upon the country, and 

1 Rogers, Hist. Agric, iv. 6. 2 Above, p. 146. 

3 Ashley, in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. iv., No. 3, p. 402. 

4 Annals of England, p. 318; Froude, History, iv. 408, 440-453. 

5 Froude, History, iv., pp. 445, 447. 6 Froude, History, v. pp. 9, 110. 





210 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

to call the existing coinage down to its actual value. 1 " By 
this desperate remedy every holder of a silver coin lost upon 
it the difference between its cost when it passed into his 
hands and its actual value in the market. On the 30th 
April 15 51 the Council passed a resolution that in future 
the shilling should pass for only ninepence, and the groat 
(4d) for threepence. 2 At the same time, such was the 
unabashed audacity of this gang of noble swindlers, they 
contemplated a fresh issue of base money ; 3 but, postponing 
this wickedness for a time, they had recourse to the great 
banking firm of the Fuggers at Antwerp, and raised loans 
at ruinous rates of interest. 4 In the month of May, how- 
ever, they issued £80,000 of silver coin, of which two-thirds 
was alloy, and in June £40,000, containing no less than 
three-quarters alloy. " This was the last grasp at the 
departing prey, and perhaps it transpired to the world : for 
so profound and so wide was the public distrust that when 
the first fall in the coin took effect prices everywhere rose 
rather than declined, even allowing for the difference of 
denomination." 5 Then in August a proclamation was 
issued by which the shilling passed for no more than six- 
pence, 6 and agaiu the nation had to bear the loss. 

But the difficulties of the Government were far from 
being at an end, and fresh means had to be devised for 
extorting money from an exhausted country. As early as 
1549 Commissioners had been appointed to make inven- 
tories of Church ornaments, jewels, vestments and other pro- 
perty, even including the Church bells 7 ; but in the autumn 
and winter of 1552-3 no less than four commissions were 
appointed with this object, "to go again over the oft- 
trodden ground and glean the last spoils which could be 
gathered from the Churches. 8 Vestments, copes, plate, even 
the coins in the poor-boxes were taken from the churches in 
the City of London. A sweep as complete cleared the 

1 Froude, History, v. pp. 9-15. 

2 /6.,v. p. 10. 3 76., p. 11. 

4 lb., p. 11 and p. 112. They had borrowed from Antwerp Jews before, 
iv. p. 399. 

5 lb., p. 12. 6 lb., p. 13. 7 In Feb, 1549, Annals of England, p. 317. 
8 Froude, History, v. p. 119, 



THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII 211 

parish churches throughout the country." 1 Other measures 
as mean and as desperate were also taken, and a subsidy 
was granted by the Parliament of 1553 ; 2 but all attempts 
to fill the treasury were rendered useless by the extraordin- 
ary rapacity 3 of the ' Council of the Minority/ the nobles 
who governed during the minority of Edward VI. Estates 
worth half-a-million sterling in the money of those days, or 
about five millions in the money of our own time, had been 
appropriated by these ministers, 4 and though the Duke of 
Northumberland accused his rival Somerset of " wilful mis- 
governance " and waste of treasure, 5 he himself obtained the 
suppression 6 of the enormously rich bishopric of Durham, 
and the whole of its temporalities were granted to him as 
a County Palatine. It is no wonder that with ministers 
such as this the country narrowly escaped ruin, nor could it 
have passed through this period as well as it did, had it not 
been for the undercurrent of sound prosperity inherited from 
the latter end of the fifteenth century. But the situation 
was most serious, especially in the rural districts, and these 
now demand our attention. 

§ 129. The Agrarian Situation. 

Of course, by this time, the symmetry of the old manorial 
system was almost entirely destroyed 7 by the revolution in 
agriculture to which we have already alluded, and which 
was now making itself felt increasingly every day. It was 
inevitable that such should be the case, and the ultimate 
benefit was, no doubt, very great, but the immediate effects 
were productive of considerable hardship to many of the 
smaller men. It is true, as has been pointed out by a 
great German economist, 8 that, after all, agriculture in this 
period (apart from the special stimulus of wool-growing) 

1 Froude, History, v. pp. 120, 121. 2 Act 7 Edward VI., c. 12. 

3 Froude, History, iv. 397, mentions ' ' the waste and luxury " of Edward 
VI. 's nobles as "the preponderating cause" of the pecuniary difficulties of 
the time. 

4 Froude, History, v. p. 128, and MS. Domestic, Edward VI., vol. xix. 

5 See preamble to Act 7 Edward VI. c. 12, inspired by Northumberland. 

6 By the Act 7 Edward VI. c. 17. 

7 Ashley, Econ. Hist., ii. ii., p. 263. 

8 Roscher, JSTationalozkonomie des Ackerbaues, bk. ii., ch. ii. 



■aS*^' 



212 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

was only passing through the second of the three great 
stages which mark its economic evolution. In these we 
may distinguish (1) the old open-field husbandry of early 
times, so closely associated with the manorial system ; (2) 
convertible husbandry, wherein the land is used for a few 
years as pasture and then put under crops, a method which 
necessitates enclosures in order that it may be properly 
carried out in a systematic and orderly manner ; and (3) 
the more modern method of rotation of crops, which begins 
in England much later than the period with which we are now 
dealing. But the process of this evolution with its resulting 
enclosures, added to the ever-increasing sheep farms, pressed 
hardly upon the smaller cultivators ; and in the reigns of 
Henry VIII. and Edward VI. we cannot help being struck 
with the terrible discontent and misery of the rural districts. 
The labourers and small husbandmen were becoming more 
and more separated from the land, while tenant farmers were 
ruined with high rents exacted by the new nobility. 1 The 
landed gentry and nobility, however, profited by this, and 
the merchants grew rich by their accumulations in foreign 
trade. 2 But those who depended directly upon the cultiva- 
tion of the land for their living suffered severely. There 
had been for some years past a steady rise in the price of 
wool 3 for export, partly because the manufactures of the 
Netherlands were so flourishing, and partly owing to a 
general rise of prices on the Continent since the great 
discoveries of silver in South America. Land-owners saw 
that it was more immediately profitable to turn their arable 
land into pasture and to go in for sheep farming on a large 
scale. 4 They therefore did three things. They evicted as 

1 Of. Latimer's Sermons (in 1548) in Froude, History, iv. p. 356. " You 
landlords, you rent raisers, I may say you steplords ! that which hereto- 
fore went for 20 or 40 pounds by the year, now is let for 50 or 100 pounds : 
and thus is caused such dearth that poor men which live of their labour 
cannot with the sweat of their faces have a living. " 

2 " Michele, the Venetian, says that many London merchants were worth 
as much as £60,000 in money ; the graziers and the merchants had made 
money while the people had starved." Froude, History, vi. 78. 

8 Rogers, Hist. Agric. , iv. 718 ; the average from 1401 to 1540 was 6s. 2^d. 
per tod, and from 1541-82, it was 17s. 4d. per tod. 
4 Cf. Froude, Ch, History, iv. 349. 



THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII 213 

many as possible of their smaller tenants, so that, as Sir 
Thomas More tells us, " in this way it comes to pass that 
these miserable people, men, women, husbands, orphans, 
parents with little children are all forced to change their 
seats, without knowing where to go." 1 Then they raised 
the rents of the larger tenants, the yeomen and farmers, so 
that, as Latimer mentions, land for which his father had 
paid £3 or £4 a year, was in 1549 let at £16, almost to 
the ruin of the tenant. 2 Thirdly, the large land-owners 
took from the poor their common lands by an unscrupulous 
system of enclosures. 3 Wolsey had in vain endeavoured to 
stop their doing this, 4 for he had sagacity enough to 
perceive how it would pauperize the labourers and others 
who had valuable rights in such land. But enclosures and 
evictions went on in spite of his enactments, with the 
inevitable result of the social disorders already alluded to. 5 

§ 130. The Enclosures of the Sixteenth Century. 

In speaking of the enclosures made at this time it must 
be remembered that they were of three kinds. 6 (1) There 
was the enclosing of the lord's demesne, which the lord had 
a perfect right to carry out if he thought it would improve 
his land, and of which no one could very well complain. 
There was also (2) the enclosing of those strips of land 
belonging to the lord of the manor which lay intermixed 

1 Utopia, p. 64 (Morley's edn. ) : the whole of the first part of the Utopia 
is well worth reading for a description of the social and industrial troubles 
of the time. 

2 Latimer, First Sermon before Edward VI. 

z Cf. Lever, Sermon in the Shroudes (Arber's edn.) 39; Russell, KeVs 
Rebellion, 50, 51 ; Fitzherbert, Surveyinge, ch. viii. ; Strype, Eccles. Mem. , 
ii. pt. ii. 360 (referring to 1548), and the evidence quoted below, pp. 214-217. 

4 Decree in Chancery, July, 1518 (Brewer, Calendar oj State Papers, ii. 
1054, No. 3297). 

5 The most important of these risings took place in Norfolk, where en- 
closures had been made upon a tremendous scale. Ket, a tanner of 
Norwich, took the lead (in 1549) of a large body of some 16,000 tenants 
and labourers, who demanded the abolition of the late enclosures and the 
reform of other local abuses. The Earl of Warwick defeated the petitioners 
in a battle, put down the rising, and hanged Ket at Norwich Castle. The 
farmers and peasantry were thus cowed into submission. Cf. full details 
in Froude, History, iv. 440-453 . 

6 Ashley, Econ. Hist., II. ii. p. 285. 



214 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

with the strips of the tenants in the open fields. To the 
enclosing of these was again no legal or moral objection 
to be made, if properly carried out, though it had always 
been the custom for them to lie alongside the others and 
share the common cultivation. The exceedingly scattered 
character of the several lands in the common fields of 
manors must have been a serious inconvenience to the 
landowner, especially if he was non-resident, since he had 
to employ, in addition to his own labour of supervision, the 
charge and risk of a collector of rents, and moreover often 
could not recover arrears unless the precise ground from 
which the rent issued was known and defined, which often 
was not accurately done. 1 There was therefore considerable 
inducement to enclose strips and, if possible, to throw them 
together contiguously. But there was, in so doing, a 
considerable opportunity of taking a piece of a tenant's 
land at the same time, and there can be no doubt, from the 
nature of the complaints made, that this was frequently done. 2 
But it was (3) the third kind of enclosures that did the 
most harm and caused the bitterest outcry ; that is, when the 
commons and even the tenants' own strips were taken from 
them. It is true that by the old statute of Merton 3 (1235-6) 
— a law passed by a parliament of landlords — landowners 
had been permitted to appropriate portions of the " waste " 
over which the free, and even the villein, tenants had certain 
rights of pasturage and turbary, provided that the lord left 
a " sufficient quantity " of common land for the use of the 
tenants. But since there was no precise rule as to what 
constituted a sufficient quantity, it is easy to see that 
enclosing landlords could do very much as they liked ; and 
by this time the statute had been forgotten and was 
entirely neglected. Everywhere complaints are heard of 
the action of the landowners. But before giving some 
contemporary evidence upon the subject we will pause for 

1 Rogers, Six Centuries, pp. 286, 287. 

2 More, Utopia, p. 64 (Morley's edn.) says : " when an insatiable wretch 
resolves to enclose ground, the owners as well as the tenants are turned 
out of their possessions by tricks or by main force, or being wearied-out by 
ill-usage they are forced to sell them." 

3 The 20 Henry III., c. 4. 



THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII 215 

a moment to notice which portion of rural England suffered 
most from these enclosures. 

Professor Ashley * has given a very complete account of 
the enclosures which took place between 1470 and 1600 
A.D.,. and from his investigations it seems that they may be 
divided into five classes, according to their magnitude in 
various counties — (1) A very large portion of Suffolk, 
Essex, and Kent was enclosed ; almost two-thirds of Hert- 
fordshire and Worcestershire, a third of Warwick (chiefly 
in the west of the county), and almost all of Durham, 
though this latter was enclosed after the Restoration. (2) 
The counties of Northampton, Shropshire, the southern 
half of Leicester, East Norfolk, and the Isle of Wight were 
enclosed to a large extent, but not quite so much as those 
first mentioned ; and (3) sporadic or scattered enclosures 
were made in the rest of Norfolk, the south of Bedford- 
shire, and north of Wiltshire. (4) The remaining counties 
were hardly disturbed by the prevailing desire, i.e., the 
counties of Yorkshire, Oxford, Nottingham, South Wilt- 
shire, and Buckingham. There remains (5) a group of 
counties about which not enough information is available 
(Surrey, Sussex, Hants, Dorset, Somerset, Stafford, Cheshire, 
Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland), and we may 
therefore conclude that enclosures did not take place there 
to any great extent. It will be seen that it was chiefly 
the Eastern and South-eastern counties where enclosures 
were made most largely, probably because they offered the 
greatest facilities for sheep-rearing and more careful agricul- 
ture. The progress of enclosures 2 spreads itself over four cen- 
turies, and vitally changed the mediseval rural economy ; but 
it was most rapid in the two periods from 1470 to 1530 A.D., 
and, much later, from 1760 to 1830 A.D. About the former of 
these two periods we will now give some contemporary evidence. 

§ 131. Evidence of the Results of Enclosing. 
Such evidence is found both in popular songs and par- 
liamentary documents. An old ballad of the sixteenth 
century complaius : 

1 Ashley, Econ. Hist., II. ii. p. 286. 

2 Cf. Ashley, Econ. Hist., II. ii. pp. 285, 286. 



216 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

" The towns go down, the land decays, 
Great men maketh now-a-days 

A sheep-cote in the church " ; 1 

and this points to the growth of sheep-farming, to which 
all other considerations had to give way. It led also to 
the " engrossing " of farms, or the occupying of a large 
number of farms merely for the purposes of pasture. A 
petition of 1536 complains of the "great and covetous 
misusages of farms within the realm, which misusages," it 
says, " hath not only been begun by divers gentlemen, but 
also by divers and many merchant adventurers, cloth- 
makers, goldsmiths, butchers, tanners, and other artificers, 
and unreasonable, covetous persons which doth encroach 
daily many farms, more than they can occupy, in tilth of 
corn — ten, twelve, fourteen, or sixteen farms in one man's 
hands at once." 2 It goes on to say that " in time past 
there hath been in every farm a good house kept, and in 
some of them three, four, five, or six ploughs kept and 
daily occupied to the great comfort and relief of your 
subjects, poor and rich. But now, by reason of so many 
farms engrossed in one man's hands, which cannot till them, 
the ploughs be decayed, and the farmhouses and other 
dwellings, so that when there was in a town twenty or 
thirty dwelling-houses, they be now decayed, ploughs and 
all the people clean gone, and the churches down, and no 
more parishioners in many parishes, but a neatherd and a 
shepherd, instead of three score or four score of persons." 
The same complaint is made by Sir Thomas More, who 
speaks 3 of the increase of pasture as " peculiar to England," 
by which " your sheep may be said now to devour men, 
and to unpeople not only villages but towns." Land-owners, 
and " even those holy men the abbots," he says, " stop the 
course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserv- 
ing only the churches and enclosed grounds, that they may 
lodge their sheep in them." The result was a terrible in- 
crease of pauperism, for men " would willingly work, but 

1 Nowa-dayes, a ballad (Ballad Society) lines 157-160. 

2 Rolls House MS., miscellaneous, second series, 854 (Froude). 

3 Utopia (Morley's edn.), p. 64. 



THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII 217 

can find none that will hire them, for there is no more 
occasion for country labour, to which they have been bred, 
when there is no arable ground left." 1 In fact, the evils 
were so great that attempts were made to deal with them 
by legislation ; 2 but they were, of course useless. " It 
remains certain," says Froude, speaking of Edward VI. 's 
reign, " that the absorption of the small farms, the en- 
closure system, and the increase of grazing farms, had 
assumed proportions mischievous and dangerous. Leases 
as they fell in could not obtain renewal ; the copyholder, 
whose farm had been held by his forefathers so long that 
custom seemed to have made it his own, found his fines or 
his rent quadrupled, or himself without alternative ex- 
pelled. The Act against the pulling down of farmhouses 
had been evaded by the repair of a room which might be 
occupied by a shepherd, or a single furrow would be driven 
across a meadow of a hundred acres, to prove that it was 
still under the plough. The great cattle-owners, in order 
to escape the sheep statutes, held their stock in the names 
of their sons or servants ; the highways and villages were 
covered in consequence with forlorn and outcast families, 
now reduced to beggary, who had been the occupiers of com- 
fortable holdings ; and thousands of dispossessed tenants 
made their way to London, clamouring in the midst of their 
starving children at the doors of the courts of law for redress 
which they could not obtain." 3 A commission was ap- 
pointed in 1548 to enquire into this distressing state of 
things, and it resulted in a petition which shows a gloomy 
picture of rural England. " The population was diminished, 
the farmer and labourer were impoverished, villages were 

1 Utopia, p. 65. The preamble to the 25 Henry VIII., c. 13, recites all 
the evils here mentioned. 

2 Cf. Act 7 Henry VIII., c. 1, for reconstruction of farm-buildings, and 
27 Henry VIII., c. 22, on same subject ; also 25 Henry VIII., c. 13, that no 
one shall keep more than 2000 sheep, or occupy more than two farms. 

3 Froude, History, iv. p. 353, who quotes as authorities Becon's Jewel of 
Joy ; Discourse of Bernard Gilpin in Strype's Memorials ; Instructions to 
the Commissioners of Enclosures, Ibid ; Address of Mr Hales, Ibid ; and a 
Draft of an Act of Parliament presented to the House of Commons in 1548, 
MS. Domestic, Edward VI. State Paper Office ; also Lever's Sermons in 
Strype's Memorials. 



218 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

destroyed, the towns decayed, and the industrious classes 
throughout England in a condition of unexampled suffering." 
The fault lay in the upper classes, " the nobles, knights, and 
gentlemen/' who by no means fulfilled their duties as 
" shepherds to the people, surveyors and overseers to the 
king's subjects," although, as the petition justly remarks, 
their position " had given them sufficient provision that 
without bodily labour they might attend thereto." * Greed 
and poverty walked side by side, and while wealth was 
increasing with the few, the many were suffering terribly 
from the general change that was passing over both agri- 
culture and society at large. 

§ 132. Other Economic Changes. The Finances. 

In fact, it becomes evident that the old mediaeval system 
of industry was breaking up in England. The new life 
created by the Renaissance was causing a keener and more 
eager spirit among all classes of men. Competition began 
to operate as a new force, and men made haste to grow 
rich. 2 The merchants were becoming bolder and more 
enterprising in their ventures. 3 The discoveries of America 
by Columbus (1492) and by Cabot (1497), and of the sea- 
route to India by Vasco di Gama (1498), had kindled a 
desire to share largely in the wealth of these newly accessible 
countries. At home the lords of the manors no longer 
remained in close personal relationships with their tenants, 
but regarded their estates merely as commercial speculations 
from which it was their business only to draw as much profit 
as possible. 4 The tenants were certainly no longer villeins, 
but were nominally independent and had ^certain rights. 
But the lords of the manors had small respect for rights that 
were only guarded by custom ; and evicted or stole land 
from their tenants to such an extent that multitudes of 
dispossessed and impoverished villagers flocked to the towns. 

1 MS. Domestic, Edward VI., vol. 5, State Paper Office; (Froude, 
History, iv. p. 367). 

2 Cf. Froude, History, iv. 510, who shows how the haste for riches caused 
fraud in the woollen cloth trade. 

3 See next chapter. 4 Froude, History, vi. 109, 110. 



THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII 219 

" The poor are robbed on every side/' said a preacher 1 of 
the day before the court, " and that of such as have 
authority; the robberies, extortions, and open oppressions 
of those covetous cormorants, the gentlemen, have no end 
nor limits nor banks to keep in their vileness. For turning 
poor men out of their holdings they take it for no offence, 
but say the land is their own, and turn them out of their 
shrouds like mice." 

Many small tenants and labourers, too, could be found 
wandering from place to place, begging or robbing. 2 
" Thousands in England," says the same preacher, " through 
such [i.e. the landlords] beg now from door to door who 
have kept honest houses." 3 The old steady village life, 
with its isolation and strong home ties, was undergoing a 
violent transition. Constant work and regular wages were 
becoming things of the past. The labourer's wages would 
not purchase the former quantity of provisions under the 
new high prices caused by the debasement of the currency 
and by the discoveries of silver from 1540 to 1600 ; 4 for 
wages, though they ultimately follow prices, do so very 
slowly, and not always even then proportionately. 

At the same time the nation was almost in the throes of 
bankruptcy. Edward VI.'s ministers were in a chronic 
condition of financial exhaustion. Money was constantly 
being raised by loans, by confiscations, and by subsidies, 
but the universal peculation of everyone connected with the 
court made it disappear like flowing water. 5 The expenses 
of the king's household were in 1549 more than one 
hundred thousand pounds, 6 then an enormous sum, and 
more than five times those of Henry VII. The labourers 
and artificers of all kinds employed by the Government 
called in vain for their wages, 7 while the daily supplies for 

1 Bernard Gilpin, quoted in Froude, History, iv. 359. 

2 Hence the very severe Act 1 Edward VI. c. 3, reducing ' loiterers ' and 
vagrants to slavery ; but it was repealed soon as being too harsh, and the 
Act of 1536 was revived by the 3 and 4 Edward VI. c. 16. 

3 Ut supra. 

4 Cf. Rogers, Six Centuries, pp. 343-345, but also Cunningham English 
Industry, i. pp. 483-487 ; also Anderson, Commerce, ii. 166. 

6 Froude, History, iv. 397. 6 lb. 

7 lb., -p. 398. 



220 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

the common necessities of the Government itself were pro- 
vided by loans at 13 per cent, from Antwerp Jews, the 
heavy interest on which was paid in the proceeds of the sale 
of bells and lead robbed from the churches and chantries. 1 
"Never before, and never since, has an English Government 
been reduced to shifts so scandalous." Queen Mary, when 
she first came to the throne attempted to economise, 2 
but afterwards her strong religious convictions induced 
her to strip the already embarrassed treasury of half its 
remaining revenues in order to re-establish a Roman priest- 
hood, 3 while her misplaced affection for her Spanish hus- 
band made her force the nation into an unnecessary and 
expensive war, besides wasting enormous gifts of money 
upon Philip himself. 4 When Elizabeth came to the throne 
she succeeded to what was practically a bankrupt inherit- 
ance. 5 Yet with all this there was wealth in the country, 
and when we come to speak of Elizabethan England, we 
shall find that, after all, the nation itself was not quite so 
poor as the Governments which bad done their best to 
ruin it. 

§ 133. Summary of the Changes of the Sixteenth Century. 

Such were the circumstances which accompanied and 
produced so great an economic transition in this period. 
{They resulted in the pauperization of a large portion of the 
[working classes, and in the impoverishment of the small 
farmers. On the other hand, the new nobles and land- 
owners gained considerable wealth. 6 The merchants also 
were exceedingly flourishing, 7 and foreign trade was grow- 
ing. In summing up, then, we may say that the suppres- 
sion of the monasteries and the creation of a new nobility 
from the adventurers of Henry YIII.'s court, who obtained 
most of the monastic wealth ; the debasement of the coinage 

1 Froude, Hist., iv. pp. 399, 400. 

2 lb. vi. p. 108. 3 lb. 4 lb., pp. 80, 82, 109 note. 5 See below, p. 234. 

6 A correspondent of Sir William Cecil, speaking of their wealth, calls 
them " the meaner sort." The Distresses of the Commonwealth, addressed to 
the Lords of the Council, December 1558. Domestic MSS., Elizabeth, vol. 
i. (Froude, vi. 110), cf. also Froude, History, vi. 78. 

7 Above, p. 212, note 2. 



THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII 221 

and the exaltation in prices, aided largely (1540 — 1600) 
by the discovery of new silver mines in South America ; x 
the rise in the price of wool both for export and home 
manufacture, coupled with the consequent increase in sheep 
farming, 2 and the practice of enclosure of land — all produced 
most important economic changes in the history of English 
labour and industry. To these we must add, towards the 
end of the sixteenth century, the great immigration of 
Flemings, chiefly after 156 7, owing to the coatinual perse- 
cutions of Alva and other Spanish rulers. 3 This gave a 
great impetus to English manufactures, its effects, however, 
being chiefly felt in the seventeenth century, when another 
immigration took place. 4 Finally, in the sixteenth century 
were laid the foundations of our present commercial enter- 
prise and maritime trade, by the voyages of Drake and 
other great sea-captains of Elizabeth's time. 5 Their expe- 
ditions, it is true, were mainly buccaneering exploits, but 
they created a spirit of maritime enterprise that bore good 
fruit in the following reigns. Nor indeed was trade even in 
the previous centuries entirely insignificant, but had con- 
siderably developed, as the next chapter will show. But 
meanwhile the state of society in England gave grave cause 
for uneasiness to the thinkers and serious statesmen of the 
day. " They beheld the organisation of centuries collapse, 
the tillers of the earth adrift without employment, villages 
and towns running to waste, landlords careless of all but 
themselves, turning their tenants out upon the world when 
there were no colonies to fly to, no expanding manufactures 6 
offering other openings to labour. A change in the relations 
between the peasantry and the owners of the soil, which 

1 Anderson, Commerce, ii. 166 ; Seebohm, Era of Protestant Reformation, 
p. 228. 

2 Seebohm, p. 49 ; Rogers, Hist. Agric, iv. 718. 

3 The edict which bore in time " its fatal fruit in the Alva persecutions," 
-was issued by the Emperor on April 29th, 1550 ; and almost immediately 
Flemings began to emigrate to England. Froude, History, iv. pp. 
533-536. 

4 See below, p. 241. 5 See below, p. 231. 

6 Froude is referring to the enormous manufacturing industry of the 
nineteenth century, beside which, of course, the growing manufactures of 
the sixteenth sink into insignificance, 



222 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

three hundred years have but just effected, with the assist- 
ance of an unlimited field for emigration, was attempted 
harshly and unmercifully, with no such assistance, in a single 
generation. Luxury increased on one side, with squalor 
and wretchedness on the other as its hideous shadow. The 
value of the produce of the land was greater than before, 
but it was no longer distributed." 1 In fact, with the 
growth of modern influences in thought, religion, industry, 
and trade, there came those modern evils which seem to be 
their inevitable accompaniment ; and we feel that in very 
truth, both for good and ill, the genius of the sixteenth 
century was more akin to that of the nineteenth than to 
that of any previous age. 

1 Froude, History, iv. 360. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE GROWTH OF FOREIGN TRADE 

§ 134. The Expansion of Commerce. The New Spirit. 

Just as the beginning of the sixteenth century marks 
what may be called an economic revolution in the home 
industries of the country, so too it marks the beginning of 
international commerce upon the modern scale. The 
economic revolution, of which the new agricultural system 
and the practice of enclosures were the most striking features, 
was a change from the old dependent, uncompetitive, and 
regulated industrial system, to one under which Capital 
and Labour grew up as separate forces in the form in which 
we recognise them now. Labour had become virtually 
independent 1 since the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, and at 
the same time it felt consciously that it was in opposition 
to capitalist and land-owning interests. In its desire for 
freedom it had also begun to shake off even its self-imposed 
restrictions, and the power of the gilds had rapidly waned. 2 
A new and eager spirit came with the Renaissance and the 
Reformation, a spirit which on the economic side showed 
itself in the development of competition, the shaking off of 
old restraints, and in more daring and far-seeing enterprises. 
Especially was this the case among the merchants, fired as 
they were by the great discoveries of the latter end of the 
fifteenth century, 3 and hence we notice, throughout the 
sixteenth century and especially at its close, that our foreign 
trade becomes more extensive than it had ever been before, 
and the foundations of our present international commerce 
were securely laid. 

1 Of. Seebohin, Era of the Protestant Reformation, p. 49. 

2 Above, pp. 189, 208, 209. 

3 Seebohm, Era of the Protestant Reformation, p. 5, 

223 



224 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

§ 135. Foreign Trade in the Fifteenth Century. 

At this point we must look back for a moment at our 
foreign trade before this new epoch. Although our enter- 
prises were by no means large, there was yet a fairly con- 
siderable trade done in the fifteenth century with the 
countries in the west of Europe, i.e. France, Spain, Por- 
tugal, and the Baltic lands, and especially with the Low 
Countries. 1 As England was then almost entirely an agri- 
cultural country, 2 our chief export was wool for the Flemish 
looms to work up ; 3 but the corn laws show that there was 
also other agricultural produce exported ; 4 and likewise 
some mineral products. In fact England supplied nearly 
all Western Europe with two most important metals, tin 5 
and lead ; the former coming chiefly from Cornwall and the 
latter from Derbyshire, 6 though in neither case exclusively 
from those counties. Bodmin was the chief seat of the tin 
trade. Our huge mineral wealth in coal and iron was 
hardly yet touched, even for home use, and hardly any was 
exported. 7 Our imports were numerous and varied, their 
number being balanced by the greater bulk and value of 
our exports of wool and lead. 

A fair amount of trade was done with Portugal and 
Spain, which sent us iron and war-horses ; 8 Gascony and 
other parts of France sent their wines ; 9 rich velvets, linens, 
and fine cloths were imported from Ghent, Liege, Bruges, 
and other Flemish manufacturing towns. 10 The ships of 

1 See the preamble to the 12 Henry VII., c. 6 (a.d. 1497), which mentions 
the trade to all these countries. 

2 Seebohm, Era of Protestant Reformation, p. 229. 

3 For its importance, cf. p. 122, and Bacon's History of Henry VII. 
there referred to. 

4 Above, p. 185. 

6 The Libelle of English Policie, about 1436 (fifteenth century), mentions 
" cloth, wolle, and tynne" as exports. 

6 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 151 ; Hist. Agric, i. 599. 

7 Coal was, however, used to a small extent, and brought by sea to 
London ; cf. Craik, British Commerce, i. 147 ; it also seems in the sixteenth 
century to have been exported ; cf Froude, History, iv. 522, in a quotation 
from a letter of Wm. Lane, merchant, of London, to Sir William Cecil, 
MS. Domestic, Edward VI., Vol. xiii. 

8 Rogers, Hist. Agric, i. 142, 144. 

9 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 151, and Hist. Agric, i. 142-144. 10 lb. 



THE GROWTH OF FOREIGN TRADE 225 

the Hansa merchants brought herrings, wax, timber, fur, 
and amber from the Baltic countries ; and Genoese traders 
came with the silks and velvets and glass of Italy. 1 All 
these met one another, as we saw before, in the great fairs, 
as at Stourbridge, or in London, the great trading centre of 
England and afterwards of the Western world. 

§ 136. The Venetian Fleet. " 

But our most important trade in the fourteenth and 
fifteenth centuries centred round the annual visit of the 
Venetian fleet to the southern shores of England. This 
was a great company of trading vessels, which left Venice 
every year upon a visit to England and Flanders. 2 Our 
English vessels did not at this time often venture into the 
Mediterranean, and so all the stores of the Southern Euro- 
pean countries, and more especially the treasures of the 
East, came to us through the agency of Venice. 3 Laden 
with silks, satins, fine damasks, cottons, and other then 
costly garments, together with rare Eastern spices, 
precious stones, and sweet wines, 4 this fleet sailed slowly 
along the shores of the Mediterranean, trading at the ports 
of Italy, South France, and Spain, till it passed through 
the Straits of Gibraltar, and at length came up the Channel 
and reached our southern ports. When it had reached the 
Downs, the fleet broke up for a time, some vessels putting 
in at Sandwich, Rye, and other towns, and a large number 
stopping at Southampton, while others went on to Flanders. 5 
Several days, sometimes weeks, were spent in exchanging 
their valuable cargoes for English goods, chiefly wool, the 
balance being paid over in gold ; and then the various 
portions of the great fleet would re-unite again and set sail 

1 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 151 ; and Hist. Agric, i. 142-144. 

2 Hence the Venetians themselves called it the "Flanders Fleet," and it 
first sailed in 1317 ; cf Cunningham, i. 381, note. 

3 Cf. Craik, British Commerce, i. 165. 

4 Cf. Libelle of English Policie: — 

" The great galleys of Venice and Florence 
Be well laden with things of complacence, 
All spicery and of grocers' ware 
With sweet wines, all manner of chaffer, ..." &c. 

5 Cunningham, English Industry, i. 381. 

P 



226 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

for Venice, from which city they were often absent for nearly 
a twelvemonth. 1 This annual visit was very convenient for 
English traders, before our own merchants ventured far 
away from our coasts. But it is a sign of the increased 
commercial enterprise of England in the sixteenth century 
that the visit then became unprofitable, and the last time 2 
the Venetian fleet came to our shores was in 1587. 

Besides this annual visit of the Fleet, there was also 
a large number of Italian merchants residing permanently 
in London, and engaged apparently in internal as well 
as foreign trade. They are mentioned in an Act 3 of 
1484, which enumerates Venetians, Genoese, Florentines, 
Apulians, Sicilians, and natives of Lucca, complains of 
their competition with native English merchants, and seeks 
to impose upon them various restrictions. The Florentines 
in London were engaged in banking, and had carried on 
this business since the days of Edward III., if not be- 
fore ; 4 the Genoese were skilled in the manufacture of 
weapons of war, and also imported materials, such as woad 
and alum, that were used in the English cloth manufac- 
tures ; 5 while the Venetians were, as we saw, engaged 
chiefly in the importation of foreign cloths and spices. 
But in course of time these foreign merchants found that 
Englishmen were beginning to engage in their own trade 
themselves, and even, as this trade increased, made voyages 
to Italy, or actually settled in Italian towns. They had 
begun to do so in the fifteenth century, 6 and had a consul 
of their own at Pisa, the chief port for English wool ; 7 and 
early in the sixteenth century we find English merchants 
visiting the Greek islands 8 and the Levant. 9 Thus the 
monopoly of the Italian visitors to England was gradually 
broken through, and English merchants took part in the 
active traffic of the Mediterranean ports. 

1 Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 101. 

3 The Fleet was in that year wrecked off the Isle of Wight ; Sir W. 
Monson (who was an eyewitness), Naval Tracts, iv. 

3 The 1 Richard III., c. 9 ; cf. also Craik, British Commerce, i. 185. 

4 Cf. Cunningham, English Industry, i. 379. 

5 lb., i. 380. 6 lb., i. 378. 

7 Rymer, Foedera, xii. 390 ; and cf. Cunningham, i. 438. 

8 Rymer, Foedera, xiii. 353 ; xiv. 424. 9 lb., xiv. 389. 



THE GROWTH OF FOREIGN TRADE 227 

§ 137. The Hanseatic League's Station in London. 

While our commerce was, however, not yet so greatly de- 
veloped, there existed in England another important institu- 
tion carried on by foreign merchants, this time from Germany. 
The Hansa, or Hanseatic League, originated in very early 
times among some of the leading trading towns of Germany, 1 
such as Hamburg and Lubeck ; and after a time these towns 
formed themselves into a League for mutual protection 
amid the constant wars and piracy of those early days, and 
became a sort of federal union.' 2 In the fifteenth century 
the League had grown so large and powerful that seventy 
cities belonged to it, and it had branches or depots in every 
important town of Northern Europe. 3 Of course there 
was a large branch at London, in the " Steelyard," on 
which spot the Cannon Street Station now stands. 4 This 
branch had existed from very early times, and a warehouse 
was there in which the German merchants stored their 
goods. In Richard II. 's time this building was enlarged, 
and so it was again in the reign of Edward IV. Round it 
dwelt the foreign merchants, who formed quite a little 
colony in the very heart of mediaeval London. Here they 
held a kind of chamber of commerce, presided over by an 
alderman, with two co-assessors and nine council-men, and 
meeting regularly on Wednesday mornings in every week. 5 
The Steelyard colony existed for some hundreds of years, 
and taught many valuable lessons in commerce to our 
English merchants. It provided for us a regular supply of 
the produce of Russia, Germany, and Norway, especially 
timber and naval stores, and also corn when our English 
harvest fell short. 6 But as our own merchants grew more 

1 The "men of the Emperor" are mentioned in King Ethelred's laws 
(De Institutis Londinie, Thorpe, i. 300) as living in London, but this was 
probably before the Hansa was formed. 

2 The chief authority for the history of the Hansa in England is Lappen- 
berg's Urhundliche Geschichte des Hansischen Stahlhqfes zu London (Ham- 
burg, 1851), but a good popular history now exists in English in H. 
Zimmern's Hansa Towns. 

3 Craik, British Commerce, i. 180. 

4 Zimmern, Hansa Towns, p. 187. 

5 Werdenhagen, quoted in Bourne's Romance of Trade, p. 99. 

6 Craik, British Commerce, i. 235. 



228 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

prosperous, and their commerce extended, they became 
jealous of the German colony. Attacks were made upon 
it by London mobs, 1 and Edward VI. actually (in 1551) 
rescinded its charter. 2 That was the beginning of the 
end. Mary restored it for a time, 3 but towards the close of 
Elizabeth's reign (1597) it was finally abolished. 4 This, too, 
was another sign of the growth of our own foreign trade. 

§ 138. Trade with Flanders. Antwerp in the Fifteenth 
and Sixteenth Centuries. 

We have mentioned before how the eastern ports and 
harbours of England used to swarm with small, light craft 
that plied all the summer through between our own country 
and Flanders. We have seen, too, that this continuous 
trade was due to the fact that we supplied the Flemish 
looms with wool. Up to the fifteenth century the chief, 
but by no means the only, Flemish emporium to which 
our English ships plied, was Bruges, 5 but in the six- 
teenth century this town quite lost its former glory, 
and Antwerp 6 took its place. The change was partly 
due to the action of Maximilian, the Emperor, to 
whom Henry VIII. was afterwards allied, and who, in 
revenge for a rebellion in which Ghent and Bruges took 
part, caused the canal which connected Bruges with the sea to 
be blocked up at Sluys 7 (1482), and thus English and other 
ships were compelled to direct their course to Antwerp, 
which was rapidly becoming a great and flourishing port. 
Antwerp remained without a rival till near the close of the 
sixteenth century, and every nation had its representatives 
there. 8 Our own consul, to use a modern term, was, at the 

1 Craik, British, Commerce, i. 233. 

2 lb., i. 233-235. 3 lb., i. 234. 

4 Anderson, Chron. Deduct. Commerce, ii. 145. 

5 The English merchants at Bruges were organised into a kind of gild or 
company, and allowed to elect a mayor of their own, Hot. Stap., 27-46 
Edward III., m. 11, Tower Records, Record Office. This was in 1359. 
See Appendix C. to Cunningham, English Industry and Commerce, 
vol. i. 

6 The " mansion " of the English merchants at Antwerp is mentioned by 
Bacon, Life of Henry VII. (p. 147, ed. Lumby). 

7 Anderson, Chron. Deduct, of Commerce, i. 511, 520. 

8 lb., p. 521. It also derived much importance from the trade carried 



THE GROWTH OF FOREIGN TRADE 229 

close of the fifteenth century, Sir Richard Gresham ; and 
later, in the reign of Henry VIIL, his celebrated son, the ^ 
financier and economist, Sir Thomas Gresham. 1 The fact of 
our having these representatives there is again a proof of 
the growth of trade in the sixteenth century. An Italian 
author, Ludovico Guicciardini (who died in 1589), gives in 
his Description of the Netherlands a very precise account 
of our own commerce with Antwerp at this period, and it 
is interesting to note how varied our commerce had by this 
time become. This is what he says as to our imports : 
" To England Antwerp sends jewels, precious stones, silver 
bullion, quicksilver, wrought silks, gold and silver cloth and 
thread, camlets, grograms, spices, drugs, sugar, cotton, 
cummin, linens, fine and coarse serges, tapestry, madder, 
hops in great quantities, glass, salt-fish, metallic and other 
merceries of all sorts ; arms of all kinds, ammunition for 
war, and household furniture." 2 As to our exports, he tells 
us : " From England Antwerp receives vast quantities of 
coarse and fine draperies, fringes and all other things of 
that kind to a great value ; the finest wool ; excellent 
saffron, but in small quantities ; a great quantity of lead 
and tin ; sheep and rabbit skins without number, and 
various other sorts of the fine peltry (i.e. skins) and leather ; 
beer, cheese, and other provisions in great quantities ; also 
Malmsey wines, which the English import from Candia. 
It is marvellous to think of the vast quantity of drapery 
sent by the English into the Netherlands." 3 

This list is sufficient to show an extensive trade, and we 
shall comment upon one or two items of it in the next 
chapter. Here we need only remark upon the great 
growth of English manufactures of cloth, and on the 
fact that English merchants now evidently traded in 
the Levant. 

on by the Portuguese after the discovery of the sea route to India. Cf. 
Craik, British Commerce, i. 215. 

1 The lives of Richard Gresham (1485?- 1549) and of Thomas Gresham 
(1519?-1579) are well given by Charles Welch in the new Dictionary of 
National Biography. 

2 Extract in Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, ii. 131. 

3 lb., ii. 131. 



230 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

§ 139. The Decay of Antwerp and Rise of London as 
the Western Emporium. 

But the prosperity of Antwerp did not last quite a cen- 
tury. Like all Flemish towns, it suffered severely under 
the Spanish invasion and the persecutions of the notorious 
Alva. In 1567 it was ruinously sacked, and its commerce 
was forced into new channels, and the disaster was com- 
pleted by the sacking of the town 1 again in 1585, 
Antwerp's ruin was London's gain. Even in 1567, at the 
time of the first sacking, and earlier still, 2 many Protestant 
Flemish merchants and manufacturers fled to England, 3 
where, as Sir Thomas Gresham promised them, they found 
peace and welcome, and in their turn gave a great impulse 
to English commercial prosperity. Throughout Elizabeth's 
reign, in fact, there was a continual influx of Protestant 
refugees to our shores, and Elizabeth and her statesman had 
the sagacity to encourage these industrious and wealthy 
immigrants.* Besides aiding our manufactures, as we shall 
see later, they aided our commerce. In 1588 there were 
38 Flemish merchants established in London, who sub- 
scribed £5000 towards the defence of England against the 
Spanish Armada. 5 The greatness of Antwerp was trans- 
ferred to London, and although Amsterdam 6 also gained 
additional importance in Holland, London now took the 
foremost position as the general mart of Europe, where the 
new treasures of the two Americas were found side by side 
with the products of Europe and the East. 

1 Craik, British Commerce, i. 260 ; Anderson, Commerce, ii. 125, 159. 

2 In 1560 Philip's envoy reported to his master that "ten thousand of 
your Majesty's servants in the Low Countries are already in England with 
their preachers and ministers." Green, History, ii. 389. Cf. also Froude, 
History, iv. 535. 

3 Anderson, Chron. Deduct, of Commerce, ii. 159 says, "About a third 
part of the manufacturers and merchants who wrought and dealt in silks, 
damasks, taffeties, bayes, sayes, serges, and stockings, settled in England, 
because England was then ignorant of those manufactures." 

4 Letters patent were granted on 5th November 1565, permitting the 
"strangers" settled at Norwich to manufacture "such outlandish com- 
modities as hath not been used to be made within this our realm of 
England." Burnley, Wool and Woolcombing, p. 67. 

5 Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 115. 6 Anderson, Commerce, ii. 159. 



THE GROWTH OF FOREIGN TRADE 231 

§ 140. The Merchants and Sea-Captains of the Elizabethan 
Age in the New World. 

It is thus of interest to note how the great Reformation 
conflict between Roman Catholic and Protestant in Europe 
resulted in the commercial greatness of England. Inter- 
esting, also, is the story of the expansion of commerce in 
the New World, owing to the attacks of the great sea cap- 
tains of those days — Drake, Frobisher, and Raleigh — as well 
as of numberless privateers, upon the huge Catholic power 
of Spain. 1 These attacks were perhaps not much more than 
buccaneering exploits, but the leaders of them firmly be- 
lieved that they were doing a good service to the cause of 
Protestantism and freedom by wounding Spain wherever 
they could. And possibly they were right. Their won- 
drous voyages stimulated others, likewise, to set out on far 
and venturesome expeditions. 2 Men dreamt of a northern 
passage to India, and although Hugh Willoughby's expedition 
failed, one of his ships under Richard Chancellor reached 
Archangel, 3 and thus opened up a direct trade with Russia ; 
so that in 1554 a company was formed specially for this 
trade. 4 Sir John Hawkins voyaged to Guinea and Brazil, 
and engaged in the slave-trade between Africa and the new 
fields of labour m America. 5 It was, too, in Elizabeth's 
reign that the merchants of Southampton 6 entered upon 
the trade with the coast of Guinea, and gained much wealth 
from its gold dust and ivory. Bristol fishermen sailed across 
the dreaded Atlantic to the cod-fisheries of Newfoundland, 7 
and at the close of Elizabeth's reign English ships began to 
rival those of other nations in the Polar whale-fisheries. 8 

1 Cf. Froude, History, ix. pp. 30, 303, 338, 485 ; also Green, History, 
ii. pp. 422-425, on the " sea-dogs " and Drake. 

2 A short summary of the deeds of Frobisher, Drake, and Cavendish is 
given in Craik, British Commerce, i. 245-256. See also Hakluyt's Voyages. 

3 Hakluyt, i. 246. *■ lb., i. 265. 5 Craik, Brit. Commerce, i. 243. 

6 Craik, British Commerce, i. 222, notes that trading voyages both to 
Brazil and Guinea become common after 1530. 

7 They had done so in Ed ward VI. 's reign, and the fisheries are mentioned 
in the 2 and 3 Edward VI. , c. 6. But only fifteen ships from England were 
engaged in the fisheries in 1577 as compared with 150 from France. 
Craik (quoting Hakluyt), British Commerce, i 259. 

8 Craik, British Commerce, i. 259, ii. 29. 



232 



INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 



This reign witnessed also the rise of the great commer- 
cial companies. The company of Merchant Adventurers 
had indeed existed since 1407. if not before, 1 having been 
formed in imitation of the Hanseatic League. The Russian 
Company of 1554 was formed upon the model of this 
earlier company ; and later came the foundation of the 
great East India Company. The last was due to the results 
of Drake's far-famed voyage round the world, 2 which took 
three years, 1577-80. Shortly after his return it was 
proposed to found " sl company for such as trade beyond 
the equinoctial line," but a long delay took place, and 
finally a company was incorporated for the more definite 
object of trading with the East Indies. 3 The date of this 
famous incorporation was 1600, and in 1601 Captain 
Lancaster made the first regular trading voyage on its 
behalf. To this modest beginning we owe our present 
Indian Empire. 4 



§ 141. Remarks on the Signs and Causes of the 
Expansion of Trade. 

Now, if we look at the broad features that mark the 
growth of sixteenth century trade, we shall see that it was 
closely connected with England's decision to abide by the 
Protestant cause. It was that which won her the friend- 
ship of the Flemish merchants ; it was the religious disturb- 
ances in Flanders that gained for London the commercial 
supremacy of Europe ; it was our quarrel with Roman 
Catholic Spain that inspired the voyages of Drake and 
Hawkins, and thus caused others to venture forth into new 
and perilous seas, over which in course of time English mer- 
chants sailed almost without a rival. And, as we have shown, 
the signs of the expansion of England are seen in events 

1 Rymer, Foedera, viii. 464. It was an offshoot of the M ercers Company, 
which originated from the Brotherhood of St Thomas of Canterbury. Cf. 
12 Henry VII., c. 6. 

2 Cf. Froude, History, xi. pp. 121-158. 

3 Craik, British Commerce, i. 251 ; Macpherson, History of the European 
Commerce with India, pp. 72-82 ; Stevens' Dawn of British Trade to the 
East Indies contains a reprint of the minutes of the Company. 

4 For the history of the Company, see ch. xviii., below. 



THE GROWTH OF FOREIGN TRADE 233 

such as the fall of the Hansa settlement in London, and the 
cessation of the visits of the Venetian fleet. On the other 
hand, the rapid growth of the port of Bristol 1 in the west 
witnessed to fresh trade with the New World, and the pro- 
gress of Boston and Hull 2 on the east coast is significant 
as showing the development of our Northern and Baltic 
trade, even to the extent of rivalling the great Hansa 
towns. 3 A great stimulus had arisen, and England was 
now taking a leading position among the nations of the 
world. It has been well remarked, 4 that in the course of 
the long reign of Elizabeth the commerce and navigation of 
England may be said to have risen " through the whole of 
that space which in the life of a human being would be 
described as intervening between the close of infancy and 
commencing manhood. It was the age of the vigorous 
boyhood and adolescence of the national industry, when, 
although its ultimate conquests were still afar off, the path 
that led to them was fairly and in good earnest entered 
upon, and every step was one of progress and buoyant with 
hope." We will now survey the condition of the country 
that was thus setting forth upon a new and active career. 

1 The Bristol merchants were most active in sending out exploring and 
trading expeditions ; cf. Cunningham, Eng. Ind. , i. 445-448 ; Rogers, Hist. 
Agric, iv. 84. 

2 They had always been important ; cf. p. 144. 

3 In fact a Company for trading in the Baltic, called the Eastland Com- 
pany, was formed in 1579, and was a competitor of the Hansa, which 
formerly had had the monopoly in that sea. Cf. Macpherson, Annals of 
Commerce, ii. 164. 

4 Craik, British Commerce, i. 239. 



CHAPTER XVI 

ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 

§ 142. Prosperity and Pauperism. 

The reign of Elizabeth is generally regarded as prosper- 
ous, and so upon the whole it was. But she had come to 
the throne with a legacy of debt from her father, 1 Henry 
VIII, and from her father's counsellors, who guided her 
young brother, Edward VI. Nor had Mary helped to 
alleviate it. " The minority of Edward," remarks Froude, 2 
"had been a time of mere thriftless waste and plunder, 
while east, west, north, and south the nation had been 
shaken by civil commotions. The economy with which 
Mary had commenced had been sacrificed to superstition, 
and what the hail had left the locusts had eaten." This 
unfortunate Queen, for whom no historian can fail to have 
a sentiment of the sincerest pity, believing that the spolia- 
tion of the monasteries by her father had caused the wrath 
of Heaven to descend upon her realm, stripped the Crown 
of half its revenues to re-establish the clergy and to force 
upon the country a form of religion which it had made up 
its mind to reject. But it is only fair to remark that the 
religious persecution in Queen Mary's reign has been much 
exaggerated, for it would appear that not more than three 
hundred persons were actually burnt at the stake as Pro- 
testants, and, even including those who died in prison, the 
total seems not to have exceeded four hundred. 3 But the 
power of the Eomish queen was less than her will, and she 
certainly lost both the confidence and affection of her people. 
Her treasury was exhausted, the nation financially ruined, 
and in the latter years of her reign famine and plague had 
added their miseries to other causes of suffering. 4 Elizabeth 

1 Froude, History, vi. 108. 2 lb. 

3 Froude (quoting Burghley), History, vi. 102. 

4 lb., vi. 109, and (famine), p. 29. 

234 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 235 

came to the throne not only with the national purse empty, 
but with heavy debts owing to the Antwerp Jews, 1 added 
to a terribly debased currency and a dangerous under- 
current of social discontent. It is to her credit as a 
sovereign that at her death danger from this last source 
had passed away. 2 This was partly due to the growth of 
wealth and industry throughout the kingdom, to the great 
gains of our foreign trade, and to the rapid expansion of 
our manufactures. But pauperism was now a permanent 
evil, and legal measures had to be taken for its relief. 3 
One abiding cause of it was the persistent enclosures which 
still went on, together with the new developments in agri- 
culture. Nevertheless, before the close of her reign the 
bulk of the people became contented and comfortable, owing 
to the prolonged peace which prevailed. The merchants 
and landed gentry, 4 or at least the new owners of the soil, 
were rich ; the farmers and master- manufacturers were 
prosperous ; even the artisans and labourers were not hope- 
lessly poor, especially among the upper working classes. 
But there was a greater tendency towards the modern con- 
ditions of continuous poverty among those less fortunately 
situated. 

§ 143. The Restoration of the Currency. 

There was, however, one great reform introduced in 
Elizabeth's reign which benefited the whole nation, and 
the working classes by no means least of all. The restora- 
tion of the currency put wages and prices upon an assured 
basis, and from that time to this both master and man, 
whether paying or receiving wages, knew exactly what each 
was giving and receiving. No measure of Elizabeth's reign 
has received more deserved praise than the reform of the 
coinage, though the praise is due not so much to the Queen, 
who made a considerable profit out of the transaction, but 

1 There was about £200,000 owing to the Jews at 14 and 15 per cent. 
Froude, vi. p. 118. 

2 For discontent at the beginning, cf. Froude, vii. p. 9. 

3 See below, p. 260. 

4 The old nobility were scanty and weak, the new were richer ; Froude, 
vi. 109. 



236 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

to the people at large, who had the good sense to bear 
cheerfully the loss and expense it involved in order to 
obtain a lasting gain. The whole mass of base money was 
estimated, somewhat roughly, at some £1,200,000 sterling. 1 
On the 27th of September 1560, the evils of an uneven 
and vitiated currency were explained by a proclamation, in 
which the Queen stated that the crown would bear the 
cost of refining and recoining the public moneys if the 
nation would bear cheerfully its share of the loss, and the 
people were invited to bring in and pay over in every market 
town, to persons duly appointed, the impure money they 
possessed. The total amount thus collected was 631,950 
pounds in weight, and for this £638,000 in money was 
paid by the receivers of the Mint. It yielded when melted 
down 244,416 pounds of silver, worth, under the new 
coinage system, £733,248 sterling. After paying for the 
cost of collection, refining, reminting, and other expenses, 
there was a balance of over fourteen thousand pounds in 
favour of the Queen. " Thus was this great matter 
ended, and the reform of the coin cost nothing beyond 
the thought expended upon it." 2 

This important question being now disposed of, we may 
turn to the condition of the industries of Elizabethan Eng- 
land, and first we must notice the steady growth of manu- 
factures in a land hitherto mainly agricultural. 

§ 144. The Growth of Manufactures. 

The economic transition before alluded to (p. 131), by 
which England had developed from a wool-exporting into a 
wool-manufacturing country, had in Elizabeth's reign been 
almost completed. The woollen manufacture had become 
an important element in the national wealth. England no 
longer sent her wool to be manufactured in Flanders, 
although much of it was still dyed there. 3 It was now 

1 Froude, History, vii. p. 6. 

2 For the whole transaction see Froude, History, vii. pp. 2-9, and the 
Lansdowne MSS., 4 ("Charges of refining the base money received into 
the Mint, with a note of the provisions and other charges incident to the 
same "). 

3 This continued till James I.'s reign ; Craik, British Commerce, ii. 33. 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 237 

worked up at home, and the manufacturing population was 
not confined to the towns only, but was spreading all over 
the country ; 1 and both spinning and weaving afforded 
direct employment for an increasing number of workmen, 
while even in agricultural villages they were frequent bye- 
industries. The worsted trade, of which Norwich was still 
the centre, spread over all the Eastern counties. 2 The 
broad-cloths of the West of England took the highest place 
among English woollen stuffs. 3 Even the North, which 
had lagged so far behind the South in industrial develop- 
ment, ever since the harrying it underwent at the hands of 
William the Norman, began now to show signs of activity 
and new life. It had, in this period, developed special 
manufactures of its own, and Manchester 4 cottons and 
friezes, York coverlets, 5 and Halifax cloth 6 now held their 
own amongst the other manufactures of the country. There 
are several signs of the progress of manufactures in this 
period, two of which deserve special attention. We find 
that it was becoming increasingly the practice for a master- 
manufacturer to employ a number of men working at looms, 
either in their own houses, or more or less under the 
master's control. So numerous had such employers become, 

1 A well-known historian (Fuller, Church History (ed. 1655), p. 142) has 
given us a list of the chief seats of the cloth trade and its distribution in 
the seventeenth century, which will illustrate this period also. In the 
East of England he mentions Norfolk and the Norwich fustians ; in 
Suffolk the bayes of Sudbury ; in Essex the Colchester bayes and serges ; 
and also the broad-cloths of Kent. In the West he notices the Devonshire 
kersies, Welsh friezes, and the cloths of Worcester and Gloucester. In 
the South Somerset was known for the Taunton serges, and Hampshire, 
Berkshire, and Sussex are all mentioned as having manufactures of cloth. 
In the North the "Kendal Greens" of Westmoreland, and the manu- 
factures of Manchester and Halifax, in Lancashire and Yorkshire respec- 
tively, are duly noted. From this list it is evident that the manufacturing 
industry was very widely spread, and must often have been carried on by 
agriculturists as a bye -industry in agricultural districts. It had not yet 
become specialised. 

2 Gf. the 14 and 15 Henry VIII., c. 3, and the 26 Henry VIII., c. 16, 
which show that Lynn and Yarmouth also had manufactures. 

3 Fuller, ut supra. 

4 Cf. the 5 and 6 Edward VI. , c. 6. The " cottons " were at that time 
a kind of woollen manufacture. 

5 Mentioned in the 34 and 35 Henry VIII., c. 10. 

6 Fuller, ut supra. 



238 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

that in the reign of Queen Mary, an "Act touching 
weavers" was passed, 1 whereby it was sought to remedy 
this condition of things. The beginnings of the factory 
system evidently did not commend themselves to six- 
teenth-century statesmen. The Preamble to the Act sets 
forth very clearly the state of things in the manufacturing 
industry at this time. " The weavers of this realm," it 
says, " have, as well in this present Parliament as at 
divers other times, complained that the rich and wealthy 
clothiers do in many ways oppress them — some by setting 
up and keeping in their houses divers looms, and keeping 
and maintaining them by journeymen and persons unskil- 
ful, to the decay of a great number of artificers which 
were brought up in the said science of weaving, with their 
families and households — some by engrossing of looms in 
their hands and possession, and letting them out at such 
unreasonable rents that the poor artificers are not able to 
maintain themselves, much less to maintain their wives, 
families, and children — some also by giving much less 
wages and hire for weaving and workmanship than in times 
past they did, whereby they [i.e. the workmen] are forced 
utterly to forsake their art and occupation, wherein they 
have been brought up." The Statute then goes on to 
enact that "no person using the feat or mystery of cloth- 
making shall keep or retain or have in their houses and 
possession any more than one woollen loom at a time," if 
they live outside a city, borough, or market town ; nor 
shall they " directly or indirectly receive or take any manner 
of profit, gain, or commodity by letting or setting any 
loom," on pain of a fine of twenty shillings. Weavers who 
live in the towns are not to have more than two looms. 
The intention of the Act obviously was to prevent the cloth- 
manufacture from falling into the power of large capitalist- 
employers, such as the millowners of the present day ; and 
though, of course, such an Act was in the end powerless 
to arrest the progress of a system which necessarily resulted 
from the development of industry, it is certainly interesting 
as showing how far that development had already proceeded. 

1 The 2 and 3 Philip and Mary, c. 11. 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 239 

The time of the factory with its capitalist master and 
hundreds of " hands " had not yet arrived, but already this 
glimmer of dawn was announcing the approaching day. 

§ 145. Monopolies of Manufacturing Towns. 

Another important sign of the growth of manufactures 
is seen in the fruitless attempts made in the sixteenth 
century to confine a particular manufacture to a particular 
town. This is a sure indication that the manufacture 
of that article was increasing in country districts, and that 
competition was operating in a new and unexpected way 
upon the older industries. An example of this may be 
seen in the monopoly granted by Parliament in Henry 
VIII/s reign 1 (1530) to Bridport in Dorsetshire, "for the 
making of cables, hawsers, ropes, and all other tackling." 
This monopoly was granted upon the complaint made by 
the citizens of Bridport, that their town " was like to be 
utterly decayed," owing to the competition of " the people 
of the adjacent parts," who were therefore by this monopoly 
forbidden to make any sort of rope. The only result of 
this measure, however, was to transfer the rope-making 
industry from Dorset to Yorkshire, and Bridport was in a 
worse plight than before. 

In the same reign (1534) the inhabitants of Worcester, 
Evesham, Droit wich, Kidderminster, and Bromsgrove, then 
almost the only towns in Worcestershire, complained 2 that 
"divers persons dwelling in the hamlets, thorps, and 
villages of the county made all manner of cloths, and 
exercised shearing, fulling, and weaving within their own 
houses, to the great depopulation of the city and towns." 
A monopoly was granted to the towns, the only result of 
which was that they became poorer than before, a great 
portion of the local industry being transferred to Leeds. 
A little later (1544) the citizens of York complain 3 of the 
competition of " sundry evil-disposed persons and appren- 
tices," who had " withdrawn themselves out of the city into 
the country," and competed with York in the manufacture 

1 21 Henry VIII. , c. 12. 2 Of. the 25 Henry VIII. , c. 18. 

8 Cf. the 34 and 35 Henry VIII., c. 10. 



2 4 o INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

of coverlets and blanketings. York obtained a monopoly, 
but her manufactures gained nothing thereby. These 
monopolies granted to towns should not be confused with 
others granted to individuals for trading purposes. Of this 
other class we shall speak later. The monopolies of towns 
here mentioned are, however, interesting as illustrating the 
growth of manufactures in all parts of the kingdom, and 
useful as showing the futility of merely protective enact- 
ments. 

§ 146. Exports of Manufactures and Foreign Trade. 

Besides these monopolies, we have ample evidence of the 
growth of our cloth manufactures in the statements made 
by the historian Guicciardini (1523-89), as to our exports 
to Antwerp. "It is marvellous," he says, 1 "to think of 
the vast quantity of drapery sent by the English into the 
Netherlands, being undoubtedly one year with another 
above 200,000 pieces of all kinds, which, at the most 
moderate rate of 25 crowns per piece, is 5,000,000 crowns, 
so that these and other merchandise brought by the English 
to us, or carried from us to them, may make the annual 
amount to more than 12,000,000 crowns," which is 
equivalent to some £2,400,000. The evidence of the 
Elizabethan writer Harrison 2 on this point is also interest- 
ing. "The wares that they (i.e. merchants) carry out of 
the realm are for the most part broad-cloths and kersies of 
all colours ; likewise cottons, friezes, rugs, tin, wool, our 
best beer, baize, fustian, moekadoes (tufted and plain), 
lead, fells, etcetera ; which, being shipped at sundry ports 
of our coasts, are borne from thence into all quarters of the 
world, and there either exchanged for other wares or ready 
money, to the great gain and commodity of our merchants." 
Here it will be seen how important a place English cloth 
manufactures take in Harrison's somewhat confused list of 
exports ; while the other commodities mentioned, such as 
lead and skins or fells, show that the older staples of our 

1 Quoted in Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, ii. 127. 

2 Harrison, Description of England, Book III. ch. iv., edition 1557 ; pages 
10 and 11 in the Camelot Series edition. 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 241 

trade were still worthy of notice. Harrison also makes a 
very interesting remark upon the direction as well as the 
character of our foreign trade, which is well worth quoting. 
"Whereas in times past/' he says, 1 "their chief trade was 
into Spain, France, Flanders, Danske (Denmark), Norway, 
Scotland, and Ireland only, now in these days, as men not 
contented with these journeys, they have sought out the 
East and West Indies, and made now and then suspicious 
voyages, not only unto the Canaries and New Spain (i.e., 
Spanish America), but likewise into Cathay, Muscovy, and 
Tartaria, and the regions thereabout, from whence, as they 
say, they bring home great commodities. But alas ! " he 
adds, " I see not by all their travel that the prices of 
things are any whit abated." The rise in prices, how- 
ever, was not due, as Harrison thought it was, to the in- 
crease of trade, but to other causes upon which we have 
already commented. One other remark of his is worth 
attention, as showing not only the growth of commerce but 
the importance of the merchant class in the social life of 
the country : " They often change estate with gentlemen, 
as gentlemen do with them, by a mutual conversion of one 
into the other." 2 At one time this would have been 
impossible, but this mention of the fact shows us how far 
the old order had changed. 

§ 147. The Flemish Immigration. 

English progress in manufactures and trade was also 
about this time greatly aided by the arrival of Dutch and 
Flemish Protestant refugees who fled from the persecutions 
of Roman Catholic rulers to a more tolerant country. This 
immigration of foreign Protestants had begun, as we saw, 3 
some time before the days of Elizabeth, but it increased 
in numbers soon after Elizabeth's accession, when the death 
of Mary had relieved England from the fear of Romish 
persecution. A numerous body of Flemings came over in 
1561, and starting from Deal, spread to Sandwich, Rye, 

1 Harrison, Description of England, Book III. ch. iv., edition 1577; 
pages 10 and 11 in the Camelot Series edition. 

2 lb., p. 9, Camelot edition. 3 Above, p. 221, note 3. 

Q 



242 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

and other parts of Kent. 1 Another body settled in Norwich, 
and over Norfolk generally. 2 In 1570 there were 4000 
natives of the Netherlands in Norwich alone. 3 There was 
also an important settlement in Colchester. 4 After the 
sack of Antwerp in 1585, the immigration largely increased. 
The new arrivals introduced or improved many manufactures, 
such as those of silk, cutlery, clock-making, hats, and 
pottery. 5 But the greatest improvements they made were 
in weaving and lace-making. They greatly developed 
" every sort of workmanship in wool and flax." 6 The lace 
manufacture was introduced by refugees from Alencon and 
Valenciennes into Oranfield (Beds.), and from that town it 
extended to Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, and Northamp- 
tonshire ; while other immigrants founded the manufacture 
of the well-known Honiton lace in Devon. 7 It is interest- 
ing thus to notice how much we owed to foreign teachers 
in earlier times, for the reigns of Edward III., Elizabeth, 
and later of Charles II., were all signalised by large influxes 
of people from the Low Countries, bringing with them 
increased skill and often considerable capital. 

An interesting testimony to the influence of these 
refugees is afforded by Harrison 8 in his Description of 
England. Speaking about ourvwool, he remarks: " In 
time past the use of this commodity consisted for the most 
part in cloth and woolsteds, but now, by means of strangers 
succoured here from domestic persecution, the same hath 
been employed unto sundry other uses ; as mockados, bays, 
vellures, grograines, &c, whereby the makers have reaped 
no small commodity." 

§ 148. Monopolies. 

The influences above mentioned all tended to promote 
the growth of our manufactures, and there was, besides, 
considerable industrial progress. It is noticeable, however, 

1 Romance of Trade, p. 114 ; Lecky, History of Eighteenth Century, i. 191 ; 
Boys, History of Sandwich, p. 740 ; and Cunningham, Eng. Ind. , ii. 36. 

2 Moens, The Walloons (Huguenot Society), 18, 79, 264. 

3 Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 115. 4 Cunningham, ii. 37. 

5 Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 114. 6 lb., p. 115. 7 lb. 

8 Book III, ch. viii., ed. 1577 ; Camelot series ed., p. 155. 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 243 

that in the Elizabethan period there arises an eager dis- 
cussion about monopolies. The fact that this question was 
now raised is sufficient to indicate the growth of a com- 
petitive spirit almost unfamiliar to mediaeval industry, 
and to show that industrial life was growing stronger 
and more self-assertive. Merchants and manufacturers 
alike were beginning to resent more keenly the inter- 
ference of government with industry, and more especially 
that form of state interference which took the shape of 
granting either to individuals or to a corporation the 
exclusive right of producing or trading in any particular 
commodity. A strong feeling is manifested against the 
possessors of monopolies, and in the dosing years of Eliza- 
beth's reign there took place in Parliament that celebrated 
debate in which both the monopolies and their holders 
were severely attacked. No doubt there was, as usual, a 
fair amount of political exaggeration and partisan statement 
introduced — for we need not imagine that the Elizabethan 
members of parliament were other than human — but there 
is also no doubt that a real grievance underlay the com- 
plaints then made. A member spoke of the " burden of 
monstrous and unconscionable substitutes to the monopolitans 
of starch, tin, fish, cloth, oil, vinegar, salt, and I know not 
what — nay, what not ? The principallest commodities of 
my town and country are ingrossed into the hands of these 
bloodsuckers of the common-wealth ; " x and the general 
feeling of the House of Commons was so strong, that 
Elizabeth thought it best to annul the monopolies then 
existing, though she was almost certainly within the legal 
limits of her prerogative in originally granting them. Her 
successor, however, James L, used his prerogative to create 
so many new monopolies that Parliament again protested 
in 1609, and he also revoked them all. But after the 
suspension of Parliamentary government in 1614, they 
were granted again, till in 1621 their existence was one of 
the main grievances which the House of Commons then 
brought before the king. 2 At a conference with the House 

1 D'Ewes, Complete Journal of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 646. 

2 Cf. Craik, British Commerce, ii. 23, 



244 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

of Lords the Commons offered to prove " that the patents of 
gold and silver thread, of inns and alehouses, and power to 
compound for obsolete laws, of the price of horse-meat, 
starch, cords, tobacco-pipes, salt, train-oil, and the rest were 
all illegal ; howbeit they touched not the tender point of 
prerogative, but, in restoring the subjects' liberty, were 
careful to preserve the king's honour." x Three patents or 
monopolies were more particularly complained of: (1) that 
of inns and hostelries, (2) that of alehouses, and (3) that of 
gold and silver thread. 2 The first two were monopolies 
granting to individuals the power of licensing inns and 
taverns, and had led to great abuses, though it is said in 
defence of the patent that the original intention was to 
place these houses under some kind of supervision in order 
to check evils that were admittedly rife in them. 3 The 
monopoly of the manufacture of gold and silver thread, 
granted to Sir Giles Mompesson, was looked upon with 
disfavour as tending to exhaust the stock of the precious 
metals in this country. 4 King James warmly condemned 
these and all other monopolies, asserting that it made " his 
hair stand upright" to think how his people had been 
robbed thereby, 5 and, though he waited three years before 
doing anything decisive, they were all abolished in 1624. 6 
The evil was not yet, however, by any means entirely 
suppressed, for it took another shape, monopolies being 
granted by Charles I. to corporations, 7 though not to 
individuals. His object was to increase the royal revenue, 
to which purpose indeed almost every expedient was applied 
that had any colour of legality. In this he was certainly 
successful, for he obtained considerable sums of money, 
receiving in one year £20,000 for soap alone. 8 But great 

1 Rushworth, Historical Collections, i. 24. 

2 Gf. James I. 's speech in Rushworth's Hist. Collections, i. 26. 

3 Cunningham, Growth of English Industry, ii. 158. 

4 lb., ii. 159, and Gardiner, History, iv. 18. 

5 See his hypocritical but amusing speech quoted by Craik, British 
Commerce, ii. 27, 28. 

6 Statute 21 James I., c. 3. 

7 See Colepepper's speech below ; and Dowell, Taxation and Taxes in 
England, i. 244. 

8 Gardiner, History, viii. 75. 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 245 

discontent was caused by monopolies of such common and 
necessary articles, and it was seen that the form of a 
" corporation " was only a cloak for individuals to increase 
their private gains. In the Long Parliament, Colepepper 
exclaimed indignantly, after reciting numerous grievances 
against the " monopolisers " : x " Mr Speaker, they will not 
bate us a pin ; we may not buy our own clothes without 
their brokerage. These are the leeches that have sucked 
the commonwealth so hard, that it is become almost hectical. 
And some of these are ashamed of their right names ; they 
have a wizard to hide the brand made by that good law in 
the last Parliament of King James ; they shelter themselves 
under the name of a corporation ; they make bye-laws 
which serve their turn to squeeze us and fill their purses." 
The system, however, of granting these patents to corpora- 
tions did not cease either then or subsequently under 
Cromwell and Charles II., but the government took care 
only to grant monopolies for such purposes as did not cause 
an outburst of popular feeling. 2 The system has in fact 
never entirely ceased, for the modern practice of granting 
patents for a limited time to inventors of new processes is 
only a modification of the old monopolies, and was pre- 
valent two hundred years ago as well as now. 3 But what 
is noticeable in the seventeenth century is the almost 
universal acceptance of the principle of monopoly as opposed 
to competition, except in those cases where monopoly was 
clearly seen to be injurious to the common welfare. The 
people might object to a monopoly of soap or salt 4 because 
they felt its effects directly ; but they considered it quite 
just and proper that a company like the East Indian should 
have a monopoly of Asiatic trade. Even when the Commons 
came into conflict with the Crown it was to them a question 
more of constitutional than of economic importance ; they 

1 Pari. Hist., ii. 656. 

2 Of. also Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 168. 

3 The Act of 1624 abolishing ordinary monopolies yet granted them for 
twenty-one years to new industries, and to new processes for fourteen 
years. 21 James L, c. 3. 

4 For that on salt, cf. Pari. Hist., i. 1205; Strafford's Letters, i. 193; 
and Gardiner, History, viii. 285. 



246 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

were trying to regain rights which had been for some time 
in abeyance, and to check the menacing growth of royal 
prerogative. As for the Crown, from Elizabeth onwards, 
there can be little doubt, although historians have sought 
to excuse its action by suggesting that it had at heart the 
proper regulation of industry, 1 that in most cases all that 
was aimed at was an increase of royal revenue or a ready 
and easy means of rewarding royal favourites. 2 There were 
of course, exceptions ; and occasionally genuine attempts 
were made to improve some languishing industry 3 by the 
doubtful method of a monopoly, but the requirements of 
the royal purse were the usual guide in matters of this 
kind. Gradually, however, the general acquiescence in the 
monopoly system which marks this period gave way before 
the progress of the spirit of competition, and though it was 
left to the statesmen of the nineteenth century to perceive 
that industry is best left as far as possible unhampered by 
government intervention, we hear but little of this particular 
form of state regulation as trade and industry expanded. 

§ 149. The Revival of the Craft Gilds. 

We have mentioned in speaking of monopolies that one 
excuse for them was that the state might seek thereby to 
regulate or supervise particular industries. Whether the 
State actually did so or not, it seems to have been thought 
necessary to return to some institution such as the old 
craft-gilds, which had practically been annihilated by the 
confiscation of their lands under Edward VI. 's guardian, 
Somerset, 4 Certainly in Elizabeth's reign the gilds were 
useless, and powerless to exercise any real influence over 
the crafts which they were supposed to represent. 5 But 

1 Of. Gardiner, History of England, iv. 7, and see his whole chapter 
(xxxiii. ) on the monopolies. 

2 The monopoly of sweet wines granted by Elizabeth to Essex was such 
a case. 

3 E.g., the patent granted to Cockayne for dyeing and dressing cloth; 
Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 165. 

4 See above, p. 208. 

5 See the petition in 1571 by fourteen London crafts ; Clode, Early Hist, 
of Merchant Taylors, p. 204. 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 247 

under this queen there came a sort of revival, or at least a 
reconstruction of the old system. New companies were 
incorporated for many trades, the ostensible reason being 
the supervision of the quality of the wares produced in that 
trade. The real cause, however, was no doubt the exist- 
ence of such " companies " among the Flemish and other 
immigrants, 1 who, as we saw, came to England in such 
large numbers at this time. Since these foreigners had 
their own associations and met in their own " halls " or gild 
houses, 2 it is not surprising that English manufacturers and 
merchants, either from feelings of jealousy or imitation, or 
both, should wish to have similar and privileged organisations. 
But these new institutions differed from the old craft-gilds 
in several ways. They no longer derived their authority 
from municipalities, but from the Crown or from Parliament. 
" They were constituted from outside, not from inside the 
town." 3 Moreover, they were associations of capitalists, 
or of capitalist employers, rather than of craftsmen, as the 
old gilds used to be, and were obliged to pay heavily for 
their patents or charters. 4 Again, various trades were often 
combined in one company, and there was often no pretence 
of supervising the wares of all the trades thus associated, 5 
though in some few cases the companies were empowered 
to exercise supervision over the quality of goods. Thus 
the haberdashers, saddlers, curriers, and shoemakers had 
supervisory rights, and in London these rights seem to 
have been exercised with some effect. 6 In the rural 
districts, however, supervision, even when supposed to exist, 
was very lax. Still, the revival of these companies is 
interesting as a kind of continuation, though on considerably 
different lines, of the gilds of mediaeval times. 

§ 150. Agriculture. 

But we must turn now from manufacturing progress to 
what was then still the greatest industry of the country, 

1 Gf. Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 47, and the note there. 

2 lb., quoting Morant, Essex, i. 77. 3 Cunningham, ut supra, q.v. 
4 The upholsterers of London paid £100 to Elizabeth for their charter ; 

ib., ii. 48. 5 lb. 

6 Gf. Act 5 Eliz., c. 8, § 31, and Cunningham, ii. 48. 



248 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

and glance at the condition of agriculture in Elizabethan 
England. Here the advance had been slow, but yet it was 
substantial, and a proof of progress is to be noticed in the 
fact that towards the end of the sixteenth century com- 
petition was making itself felt among tenants for farms. 
Competitive rents x had been hitherto almost entirely 
unknown in England, but now were becoming more frequent, 
resulting of course in a rise of rent. But the competition 
itself in this case shows progress, 2 and this would also seem 
to be indicated by the comfortable condition of the yeomanry 
in this period. 3 The growth of our manufactures helped of 
course to promote sheep-farming, not only (as before) on 
the part of great landowners, but even of ordinary, moderate 
farmers. Upon this point Harrison mentions an important 
fact 4 : " And there is never an husbandman (for now I 
speak not of our great sheep-masters, of whom some one 
man hath 20,000) but hath more or less of this cattle 
(sheep) feeding on his fallows and short grounds, which 
yield the finer fleece." The same writer also mentions 
that sometimes grazing was preferred to tillage, because it 
required less care and capital, but he does not lay so much 
stress on this as would lead us to suppose that this change 
was regarded as so great an evil as it was formerly. 5 He 
seems to think it rather characteristic of a u mean gentle- 
man " to change arable land into pasture, for he speaks 6 of 
"a mean gentleman who hath cast up all his tillage because 
he boasteth how he can buy his grain in the market better 
cheap than he can sow his land," and adds that " the rich 
grazier often doth also upon the like device, because grazing 
requireth a smaller household and less attendance and 
charge." 7 But besides grazing and sheep-farming, which 
had long since risen into importance, our agriculture had 
improved in several respects. Here foreign influence, 

1 Cf. Norden's Surveyor's Dialogues (first edition, 1607), and Rogers, 
Hist. Agric. and Prices, v. 42, 43. 2 lb., v. 43. 

3 Harrison, Description of England, Caraelot series edition, p. 12. 

4 lb., p. 156. 

5 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 52, thinks the mischief of over- 
much grazing declined at the close of the sixteenth century. Cf. also" 
Froude, History, vii. p. 10. 6 Harrison, u. s., p. 36. 7 lb. 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 249 

especially that of the Low Countries, 1 is again visible. 
Already a change in the mode of cultivation had been 
brought about, not so great as that which took place in the 
two succeeding centuries, but still quite perceptible. A 
larger capital was brought to bear upon the land, 2 the breed 
of horses and cattle was improved, 3 and more intelligent 
use was made of manure and dressings. 4 It was said that 
" in Queen Elizabeth's days good husbandry began to take 
place." 5 In addition to these improvements, the coming 
of the Flemings and Dutch introduced several new vege-' 
tables. The refugees cultivated in their gardens carrots, 
celery, and cabbages, which were previously either unknown 
or very scarce in this country, 6 and from the garden these 
plants were introduced into the farm. 7 The most important 
service to agriculture, however, was the introduction of the 
hop, which is said to have been brought to England by 
some Flemish as early 8 as 1524, and later in the century, 
in Elizabeth's reign, the hop gardens of Kent had already 
become famous, 9 and have remained so ever since. As 
regards wheat, it is noticeable that its price was now rising 
considerably, but was subject to remarkable fluctuations, 
varying from 5 s. to 25 s. a quarter 10 in the last half of the 
sixteenth century. The average price, however (from 1540 
to 1582), was 13s. 10Jd., a considerable increase upon 
that of the previous century and a half, when (from 1401 
to 1540) it was only a farthing under six shillings. 11 This 
may have been due to the Elizabethan coru laws 12 or possibly 

1 Rogers, Hist. Agric. and Prices, v. 45, 64. He also mentions that this 
influence was first to be noticed in the eastern counties of England, 
because they had close business connections with' Holland and Flanders. 
Of. also Harrison, Description of England, p. 26, Camelot edition. 

2 Green, History of England, ii. 387. 3 lb. 

4 Cf. Gervase Markham's works, The English Husbandman (1613), and 
the Farewell to Husbandry (4th edition, 1649), and remarks in Rogers, 
Hist. Agric, v. 52. 

5 Dymock, Samuel Hartlib, his Legacy, p. 52 (1651). 

6 Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 57. 7 lb., v. 50. 

8 Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 29. 

9 lb. They were also grown in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex ; Norden, 
in Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 44. 

10 Rogers, Hist. Agric and Prices, iv. 270, 271. n lb., Tables, iv. 292. 
12 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 54, 55. 



2 so INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

to the increase of population ; but, however that may be, it 
had the effect of encouraging tillage once more. But the 
great advance in agriculture had not yet come. That was 
reserved for the next two centuries. Meanwhile the greater 
part of rural England was going on in much the same 
old ways. In spite of numerous enclosures, the primitive 
common field system was still in vogue among ordinary 
husbandmen, 1 and the innate conservatism of the agricul- 
turist was only here and there disturbed by the efforts of a 
few adventurous spirits who were introducing new plants 
and new methods. 

§ 151. Social Comforts. 

All this increase of the national wealth in commerce, 
manufactures, and industry produced important changes 
in the mode of living. The standard of comfort became 
higher. 2 Food became more wholesome. As agriculture 
improved and animals could be kept through the winter 
with greater ease, salt meat and salt fish no longer formed 
the staple food of the lower classes for half the year. 
Brickmaking 3 had been re-discovered about 1450, and 
by the time of Elizabeth the wooden or wattled houses 
(p. 81) had generally been replaced, at least among all but 
the poorer class, with dwellings of brick and stone. 4 The 
introduction of chimneys and the lavish use of glass also 
helped to improve the people's dwellings ; 5 and, indeed, the 
houses of the rich merchants, or the lords of the manors, 
were now quite luxuriously furnished. 6 Carpets had 
superseded the old filthy flooring of rushes ; pillows and 
cushions were found in all decent houses ; 7 and the 

1 Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 49, illustrates this from the survey of Gam- 
lingay (Cambs.), made for Merton College, Oxford, in March 1602. 

2 See Harrison, Description of England, Bk. III. ch. i. ed. 1577: "Of 
the food and diet of the English." — Camelot edn., pp. 84-106. 

3 Rogers, Econ. Interpretation of History, p. 279. 

4 See Harrison, Description of England, Bk. II. eh. x. edn. 1577, Camelot 
edn., p. 117. 

5 lb., pp. 116 and 119 of Camelot edn. 

6 lb. "The furniture of our houses also exceedeth, and is grown in 
manner even to passing delicacy." 

7 lb., p. 118, Camelot edn. (for carpets), p. 119 (pillows, etc.). 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 251 

quantity of carved woodwork 1 of this period shows that 
men cared for something more than mere utility in their 
surroundings. The lavishness of new wealth was seeu, too, 
in a certain love of display, of colour, and of "purple and 
fine linen," which characterises the dress of the Elizabethan 
age. 2 The old sober life and thought of mediaeval England 
had been entirely revolutionised by the sudden opening of 
the almost fabulous glories of the New World, and men 
revelled joyously in the new prospects of the wealth of the 
wondrous West. There was, moreover, now far greater 
security of life and property than of old, and consequently 
the old fortified castles of mediae val days had disappeared, 
as the need for fortification of residences passed away, and 
the nobility and gentry now sought comfort and magnificence 
rather than strength and security in their abodes. 3 And 
with this increased security and the growth of wealth we 
notice also the growth of capitalism 4 and of a capitalist 
class, so that the merchant of Elizabeth's days was able to 
engage in enterprises far larger than those of his predecessors. 
But yet there were the seeds of pauperism in the land, and 
all the wealth of the merchants and the adventurers of 
Elizabethan England did not prevent the sure and inevit- 
able Nemesis that followed upon the crimes and follies of 
Elizabeth's father and his court. 

§ 152. The Condition of the Labourers. 

For it is impossible, in glancing at the condition of 
labour in the days of Elizabeth, to forget the disastrous 
economic changes wrought by the actions of Henry VIII. 
and his followers. Compared with the fifteenth ceutury, 
the poverty of the wage-earners in Elizabeth's reign was 
often great indeed, though even then not so bad as it sub- 
sequently became. It was not that the working classes, as 
a whole, were badly off in the Elizabethan age, for there 
was undoubtedly a fair amount of prosperity; but there 

1 Green, History, ii. 391, notices this. 

2 Harrison, u. s., Bk. III. ch. ii., edn. 1577. Camelot edn., pp. 107-112. 

3 Cf. Green, History, ii. 392. 

4 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 6. 



252 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

were greater extremes amongst them than before, and a 
larger number of indigent in their ranks. Many of the 
petty copy-holders who had been dispossessed of their lands 
by the enclosures of previous years had fallen into beggary ;* 
the less provident of the labourers had lost their mediaeval 
curtilages and plots of land in the same way, 2 and therefore 
there was a more numerous class now dependent for their 
livelihood on wages only. 3 Consequently there was often 
a large number of unemployed wage-earners, and fluctua- 
tions in employment became more seriously and more 
acutely felt. Contemporary writers complain that the rich 
were still often encroaching on the poor man's land, 4 as 
they have frequently done since Scriptural times ; and the 
labouring man was often too poor to buy himself corn 5 — 
a state of things which did not occur so frequently when 
everyone had some share in the land and did not depend 
on wages only. A great loss must also have been felt by 
the working classes in the abolition of the old gilds and 
the decay of the old customs associated with them. The 
merry gild-feast was no longer a feature of village life, 6 and 
holidays and festivals were reduced to a lesser number. 7 
From this time forward we shall not find much advance in 
the lot of the labourer. One of his most prosperous periods 
was fast approaching its close, and on the whole the next 
two centuries show a steady deterioration. 

Of course the condition of labour will be best seen by taking 
examples of the wages then given. In Elizabeth's reign, then, 
we may reckon 8 the yearly wages of an agricultural labourer 

1 Froude, History, vii. p. 9. 

2 Rogers, Hist. Agric. and Prices, iv. 755. 3 Cf. the Act 31 Eliz., c. 7. 

4 Harrison, Description of England, Bk. II. ch. 7, ed. 1577 ; p. 19, 
Camelot edn. 

5 lb., Bk. III. ch. i. ; page 96, Camelot edn. 

6 lb., Bk. II. ch. v., edn. 1577 ; p. 78, Camelot edn. : "The superfluous 
numbers of wakes, guilds, fraternities, churchales are well diminished and 
laid aside." Harrison approved of their abolition, it seems. But cf, 
Blomfield's Norfolk, iii. 185, who says, " The poor of the parish always 
were partakers with them," which shows that they helped to relieve 
pauperism. 

7 Harrison also thought these "very well reduced." But he was a 
clergyman, not a labourer. Description, ut supra. 

8 Rogers, Hist. Agric. and Prices, iv. 737, 738. 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 253 

at about £8, 4s., and the cost of living, which now included 
house rent, formerly unknown, at £8, thus leaving a very 
narrow margin for contingencies. Daily wages were 1 (in 
1563) — for artisans, 8d. a day in winter and 9d. in sum- 
mer ; for labourers, 6d. in winter and 7d. in summer, and 
in harvest-time occasionally 8d. or even lOd. This is not 
very much more than the wages paid at the close of the 
fifteenth century 2 (viz., artisans 3s. a week and labourers 
2s.), but the price of food had risen almost to three times 
the old average, while wages had only risen 3 in the propor- 
tion of 1 to T72. Moreover, a new system was in this 
reign introduced for arranging wages. 

§ 153. Assessment of Wages by Justices. 

The celebrated Statute, 4 by which this system of the 
legal arrangement of wages was introduced, has rightly 
been called a monumental work of legislation. 5 " Taken 
in conjunction with the Poor Law of the same year, which 
was, however, subsequently modified, it forms a great 
system for controlling both the employed and the un- 
employed ; all the experience of preceding reigns is 
gathered together, and the principal statute was so well 
framed that it continued to be maintained for more than 
two centuries." 6 It certainly had an immense, controlling 
influence upon the destinies of the working classes, though 
opinions have differed widely as to whether that influence 
was beneficial or otherwise. Before discussing this point, 
however, we will briefly examine the provisions of this 
famous Act. 

The preamble is remarkable in that, unlike all previous 
Statutes of Labourers, it shows a tender concern for the 
welfare of the labourer, and expresses a fear that his wages 
may occasionally be too low. It states that " the wages 
and allowances rated and limited in many of the said 

1 From the proclamation of Elizabeth for the county of Rutland in 
1563. Rogers, Hist. Agric, iv. 121. 

2 Above, p. 173. 3 Rogers, Hist. Agric, iv. 757. 

4 The Act 5 Eliz., c. 4(1563). 

5 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 38. 6 lb. 



254 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

statutes (i.e., the old Statutes of Labourers) are in divers 
places too small and not answerable to this time, respecting 
the advancement of prices of all things belonging to the 
said servants and labourers/' and " the said laws cannot 
conveniently, without the great grief and burden of the 
poor labourer and hired man, be put into good and due 
execution." This sudden change of attitude on the part 
of the legislature is most instructive, and even has its 
humorous side. It shows a complete change of tactics in 
dealing with the working classes, but one cannot help 
feeling some lurking doubt as to whether all these honeyed 
words were genuine. After all, the object of this statute 
was the same as that of the older ones, namely, to give 
fixity to wages ; and it is so unusual to find one class 
legislating in favour of another without some adequate 
motive that one cannot help thinking that there was 
something behind all this generosity. Nor is the motive 
far to seek. It was to place the regulation of wages not 
merely in the hands of Parliament, whose methods were 
necessarily slow and cumbersome, but in the hands of the 
employers of labour, or at least in the hands of a class 
who would sympathise with employers. Briefly, wages 
) were in future to be fixed by the justices of the peace 
V in quarter sessions, and both employers and employed were 
\ bound to abide by the assessments thus made. There 
could be little doubt that the employers would abide by 
them readily enough, for the local justices of the peace 
were sure to be either employers themselves or drawn from 
the same rank in life ; and the severe penalties imposed 
upon those who disobeyed the assessment were hardly 
likely to be incurred by any except the working classes. 
The generous preamble of the Statute thus resulted in an 
enactment which, if it could only be enforced, was likely to 
place the workmen entirely at the mercy of their em- 
ployers. Of course employers might be, and no doubt 
often were, men of good and honest heart, and wishful to 
do the best for their labourers; but it was, to say the 
least, placing a great temptation in their way to give them 
the authority to fix a rate of wages to which all were 






ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 255 

compelled by law to adhere. It is true that this assess- 
ment of wages was no hard and fast rule, but was to 
vary itself with the fluctuations in the prices of provisions ; 
and the inventors of this kindly scheme expressed a pious 
hope that " it might yield the hired person, both in the 
time of scarcity and in the time of plenty, a convenient 
proportion of wages." But it is to be noted that they 
added nothing to the statute to make this hope effectual 
in practice. All they remark is that the justices should 
take into account, in fixing wages, the price of food " and 
other circumstances necessary to be considered " — a some- 
what vague recommendation ; and the " hired person " had 
very little voice in the matter. 

It may be going too far to characterise this assessment 
scheme — as one outspoken writer does — as " a conspiracy 
concocted by the law and carried out by the parties inter- 
ested in its success," x and we may give the employers and 
legislators of Elizabethan days credit for the highest and 
kindest intentions in a general sort of way ; but no one 
except a Utopian optimist can shut his eyes to the fact 
that this ingenious system gave even the best of employers 
a direct interest in keeping the assessment of wages for 
his district as low as possible ; and, human nature being 
what it is, no one can be surprised if his pocket often 
tended to get the better of his generosity. And, as a 
matter of fact, this was of course the case. It is absurd to 
talk about our forefathers as if they were more than human ; 
and experience of human nature shows that it is liable to 
succumb to temptations far less than those which the Act 
of Elizabeth placed before its administrators. 

§ 154. The Working of the Assessment System. 

Modern historians are nothing if not controversial, and 
consequently no one need be surprised to find that this 
Statute is alternately belauded as having been intended to 
do a real kindness to the working classes and decried as a 
legal conspiracy to do them an injury. This aspect of the 
question has been already dealt with sufficiently, but the same 
1 Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 398. 



256 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

controversy exists as to whether the Act was ever properly 
effective. It is amusing to find apologists for it declaring 
that, after all, it was never really enforced ; * and, amid 
the usual contradictions of economic as of other history, it is 
occasionally hard to find the truth. But it certainly seems 
to be the case that, in spite of the continued increase in 
the price of the necessaries of life, the wages of labour 
did conform to the justices' assessments, and that these 
assessments were too low to give the labourer an oppor- 
tunity of really comfortable subsistence. 2 The effect of the 
Statute was not felt so keenly as long as his wages were 
supplemented by the ownership of a small plot of land 
or by rights of common ; but when the enclosures of the 
eighteenth century took these away from him, the labourer 
was indeed badly off. 3 At any rate, if the intention of the 
Act of 1563 was really to raise wages, it was a failure in 
this respect, for " the machinery it created " (as an historian 
naively remarks 4 who takes a very favourable view of it) 
" had not sufficed to raise wages according to the scarcity 
of the times" in the century following. This is not 
surprising ; the marvel would have been that wages should 
have risen when the administrators of the Act were so 
closely interested in keeping them down. But there can 
be no dispute that, whether owing to the assessment or 
not, wages steadily declined in the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries, taken as a whole, as the following tables 5 
will show, though, of course, in so long a time there were 
naturally periods of slight improvement. The only 
question that arises is : how was it that for once a Statute 
of Labourers achieved its object when similar statutes 
had in previous reigns been so ineffectual ? 

The reasons for this are several. The labourer had 
been already weakened (as we saw 6 ) in the reigns of 
Elizabeth's father and brother by the debasement of the 
currency, the change from tillage to sheep-farming, and the 

1 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 199, 200. 

2 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 353. 3 lb. 

4 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 195. 

5 Compiled from Rogers, Six Centuries, ch. xiv. pp. 387-398. 

6 Above, pp. 206-218. 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 



257 



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258 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

numerous enclosures of land. These all had their due effect 
upon his condition. But there were two other causes of 
equal power operating at the same time. (1) The condi- 
tions of industry had already largely changed ; men were 
less bound to the land than formerly, having been in some 
cases driven off it by sheep-farms and enclosures, and in 
others attracted from it by the progress of manufacturing 
industries. There was, therefore, a much larger class than 
formerly dependent entirely on wages, 1 with no land of their 
own to fall back upon, and consequently compelled to take 
what they could get from the nearest employer. This was 
in itself a source of weakness ; and this weakness was 
increased by another cause. (2) The old unions of work- 
men had decayed, the craft gilds had become obsolete or 
effete, 2 and there was nothing to bind the working-classes 
together in self-defence. The combined action 3 that re- 
sulted in the Peasants' Revolt of the fourteenth century had 
become a thing so completely of the past that it had fallen 
into oblivion ; and not only that, but the law had now been 
strained into that iniquitous doctrine of " conspiracy " which 
stamped all efforts of workmen to improve their condition as 
ipso facto illegal. It was accounted as a "conspiracy," 4 and, 
therefore, a legal offence, for workmen to enter into any asso- 
ciations to raise, or endeavour to raise, the rate of wages ; and 
workmen who entered into such illegal combinations were 
punishable by fine or imprisonment. Meetings held for similar 
purposes were punishable in the same way, while every 
inducement was given to a workman to turn traitor and 
betray his fellows by the promise of indemnity to offenders 
who informed against their associates. For centuries 5 this 
tyrannical measure disgraced our statute books ; and yet 
we are asked to believe that the legislators, who framed 
this law and invented the doctrine of conspiracy to supple- 
ment the scheme of assessment of wages, were actuated only 

1 Above, p. 252. 2 Above, pp. 189, 207-209, and cf. p. 247. 

3 Above, p. 163. 

4 Cf the Act 2 and 3 Edward VI., c. 15, and the 40 Geo. III., c. 108. 
The clauses 18, 19, and 20 of the 5 Eliz., c. 4, were also strained to support 
this doctrine; cf. Rogers, Six Centuries, pp. 397, 399. 

5 Till the 6 Geo. IV., c. 129 ; see below, pp. 416-420. 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 259 

by their kindly concern for the welfare of the working man. 
But, leaving intentions and motives out of the question, it 
is easy to see how powerfully the foregoing causes must have 
operated in depressing the condition of the labourer, and 
thus rendering it easy to enforce the Elizabethan code of 
labour laws. 

§ 155. The Law of Apprenticeship. 

There are, however, certain clauses in this statute which 
are noticeable as regulating the apprenticeship system. 
In agriculture, any person who had half a ploughland in 
tillage might take a boy to serve as an apprentice in hus- 
bandry till he was twenty-one years of age. In crafts, a 
period of seven years was laid down as the time of appren- 
ticeship ; and in order that apprenticeship might be a 
reality in its educational aspect, every master who had more 
than three apprentices was required to have one journeyman 
for every apprentice over this number. By this means 
masters would be prevented from getting work done by 
apprentices which ought to be done by more qualified work- 
men. These regulations applied to the whole country, and 
not merely, as in mediaeval times, to trades which had gilds. 
It is interesting to note that certain limitations were made 
which were evidently intended to benefit the agricultural 
interest ; and once again one cannot refrain from a suspicion 
that the landed classes, who constituted the majority in 
Parliament, were not actuated entirely by motives of pure 
benevolence to others. We find that persons engaged in 
agriculture, or in any trades connected therewith (such as 
smiths, wheelwrights, and also the weavers of linen and 
household cloth x ) might take any apprentice they could 
find. But artisans in corporate towns and market towns 
were more restricted ; they could not take any one who was 
not the son of a freeman of such town, and the apprentice 
taken by them was not to be withdrawn from agriculture ; 
while merchants and shopkeepers in corporate towns were 
restricted to the sons of " forty-shilling freeholders," and 

1 See § 23 of the 5 Eliz. , c. 4. This shows how mauf actures and agricul- 
ture were often combined. See above, p. 237, and note there. 



260 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

those in market towns to the sons of " sixty-shilling free- 
holders." It has been said that " as a scheme of technical 
education the regulations for artisans were admirably suited 
to the needs of the times" ; x and there is no doubt that in 
many respects these regulations were beneficial. But it is 
always a suspicious circumstance when legislators belonging 
to any particular class introduce restrictions that would 
naturally benefit the interests of their own order ; and it is 
very obvious that what was sought in these apprenticeship 
clauses was quite as much the convenience of the agricul- 
tural interest as the promotion of a scheme of technical 
education. Neither the landed gentry nor the agriculturists 
whom they represented need be blamed for their action. 
Any other class in their position would no doubt have done 
the same. But it is superfluous, not to say absurd, to 
imagine that Elizabethan Parliamentarians were actuated, 
any more than other men, solely by a desire for the welfare 
of others. 

It should be added, when considering the effects of the 
apprenticeship system as thus laid down under Elizabeth, 
that in after years there grew up a vast number of trades 
that were never touched by this Act at all, since it only 
applied to those actually in existence at the time of its 
passing. The trades which arose in later times were out- 
side its operations altogether, and were usually known as 
the "incorporated trades," because they were regulated not 
by this Act but under patents granted to those who invented 
a new manufacture or improved an old one. 

§ 156. The Elizabethan Poor Law. 

Closely connected with all this industrial regulation, 
which we have now briefly reviewed, was the new legisla- 
tion rendered necessary by the steady increase of pauperism 
— a phenomenon all the more remarkable because it was 
also accompanied by a rapid growth of national wealth. 
The spectacle of Dives and Lazarus existing side by side is 
in our own day so common as to excite little remark ; and 
the poor-rate is regarded with the same equanimity — or 
1 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 41. 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 261 

hopelessness — as the charges for water or police. But 
it was still of sufficient novelty in the reigns of Henry 
VIII. and his children to cause English legislators con- 
siderable uneasiness. We have already seen (pp. 195, 205) 
how it was dealt with in former days, and later, in the last 
year 1 of Edward VI., two collectors were appointed in every 
parish, whose business it was to obtain from every person of 
substance a promise of alms for the relief of the poor, to 
enter such promises in a book and collect the money, and 
to relieve the poor with it. In the beginning of Elizabeth's 
reign it was found that further pressure was needed to make 
people give, and therefore in 1563 another Act 2 was passed, 
by which a person who was unwilling to contribute to the re- 
lief of the poor, and who would not be affected even by the 
exhortations of his bishop, had to appear before the Justices 
of the Quarter Sessions and submit to a tax or assessment 
imposed upon him by them, or be thrown into prison. The 
provision for the relief of the poor was, in fact, altogether 
changing in character. It was no longer a free act of 
Christian charity, but a compulsory contribution towards the 
mitigation of a social evil, a contribution of the same nature 
as the nineteenth century poor-rate. There was now " only 
a step from the process under which a reluctant subscriber 
to the poor law was assessed by the Justices, and imprisoned 
on refusal, to a general assessment of all property." 3 This 
step was taken by the celebrated Poor Law of Elizabeth i in 
1601. This famous and long-lived 5 Act prescribed the 
levy of a compulsory poor-rate in every parish, designated 
the kind of property on which the rate was to be levied, and 
inflicted penalties on those who disobeyed its provisions. 
Work was to be provided for those who would or could work, 
and relief for those who could not ; poor children were to 
be trained to some craft ; and the idle were to be punished. 
Such was the remarkable Act with which, as has been so 
justly pointed out, the history of English labour has been 

1 By the 5 and 6 Ed. VI., c. 2. 2 The 5 Eliz., c. 3. 

3 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 420. 4 The 43 Eliz., c. 3. 

5 It was only meant, however, at first to be temporary, but it was 

renewed in the next Parliament, and at last made permanent by the 
16 Charles I. , c. 4. 



262 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

ever since its enactment most intimately associated. 1 At 
this space of time it is hard to look upon it with eyes 
unprejudiced, either favourably or unfavourably ; but possibly 
the best comment upon it has been supplied by its own 
subsequent history, which has never been able to record its 
success. One of its greatest defects has been the lack of 
any adequate sj^stem of providing employment for the poor, 
and this has been the weak point of the whole English 
Poor-Law code. Work was indeed meant to be provided 
by this Act of 1601, but its local administrators never set 
themselves seriously to raise a fund and find such work for 
the unemployed 2 by providing a stock of hemp, wool, iron, 
and other materials. 3 The traiuing of children as parish 
apprentices led to their ill-treatment, 4 and the system of 
providing relief from the rates developed into one of the 
most foolish of abuses. 5 With these points we shall deal 
later, as their full effect becomes more visible ; but there 
is one which requires notice before we go any further. 

In the third clause of this historic Act there is a pro- 
vision, that if a parish is not rich enough to maintain its 
own poor entirely, the deficiency, if any, in the rates shall 
be supplemented from the rest of the hundred. 6 This 
seems at first sight a reasonable provision, and was prob- 
ably inserted by the framers of the Act as requisite in 
view of a very possible contingency. It was not acted 
upon at first to any great extent, 7 but subsequently it 
became a favourite instrument of employers of labour for 
reducing wages, first by lowering them in their own parish 
to such a point that it was necessary to give the labourer 
an enormous amount of relief out of the rates, and then by 
throwing the burden of this relief upon surrounding 
parishes. 8 The use thus made of this clause in after 
years was certainly ingenious, for a large proportion of a 
labourer's wages would thus come out of the pockets of the 
general public, while a corresponding saving was effected 

1 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 421. For various views see Cunningham, 
Growth of Industry, ii. 58-61, and Fowle, Poor Law, p. 58. 

2 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 61. 

3 Of. the 18 Eliz., c. 3. 4 See below, p. 388. 5 Below, pp. 412-414. 
6 43 Eliz., c. 3, § 3. 7 Fowle, Poor Law, p. 58. 8 Below, p. 412. 




DISTRIBUTION 
OF WEALTH IN 

ENGLAND 

1636 



I HI S II SEA 



C^/ ^ A 



NOR^TH 
SEA 




Scale of English Miles 

10 20 30 40 50 75 1O0 



WEALTH IN ENGLAND IN 1636. 

This Map is based on the well-known assessment for ship-money, and gives the assessment 
per square mile, It should be compared with that opposite page 196. 



1. Coun 

2. 
3 
4. 
5 
6 



ies assessed at £Q to £7 per square mile 
£5 to £6 
£4 to £5 
£3 to £4 
£2 to £3 
under £2 



Dark Brown. 

Dark Green. 

Dark Red. 

Light Brown. 

Light Red. 

Light Green 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 263 

by his employer. The ingenuity of the arrangement is 
perhaps more conspicuous than its honesty : of that my 
readers can judge for themselves ; but it merely shows, as 
has been remarked before, that human nature can rarely 
resist a temptation which is addressed to its pocket. The 
action of this apparently innocent clause is seen more 
clearly in the eighteenth century, 1 but it is well to notice 
it here, in its place, as a weak spot in an Act that was 
never particularly strong. 

§ 157. Population. 
We may now conclude our survey of Elizabethan 
England with a brief notice of the then existing number 
of inhabitants. The marked improvement in agriculture 
and the increase of wealth brought with them, at the close 
of the sixteenth century, an equally marked increase of 
population. We saw that at the time of Domesday the 
population of England w r as under two millions. 2 When 
the poll-tax of 1377 was levied, in the last year of 
Edward III.'s reign, it had not much increased, being at 
most not more than two and a quarter or two and a half 
millions, according to careful calculations based upon the 
returns of this tax. 3 But by the end of Elizabeth's reign it 
had risen rapidly to some five million souls, 4 at which figure 
it remained for some hundred and fifty years longer. The 
bulk of the population was still in the southern half of the 
country, 5 although the north was now becoming more pros- 
perous, owing to the extension of manufactures. It will be 
seen that England was by no means overcrowded, and yet 
people were found who complained of the increase of popu- 
lation. William Harrison, 6 in his Description of England, 
remarks : " Some also do grudge at the great increase of 

1 Below, pp. 412-414. 2 Above, pp. 66, 106. 

3 Topham, in Archaeologia, vii. 337. 

4 Rogers, Six Centuries, 463, says still only 2\ millions, but if so it rose 
very rapidly to 5|- millions by 1688. King, in Davenant's Works, ii. 184. 

5 This may be easily seen in the assessment made later by Charles I. for 
ship-money in 1636. See also Rogers' valuable chapter vii. on The distribu- 
tion of wealth in England at different epochs in his Economic Interpretation 
of History, p. 138 sqq. ; and in Hist. Agric, v. 66-125. 

6 Page 125 (Camelot series edition) ; Bk. III. , ch. 5, of 1577 edn. 



264 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

people in these days, thinking a necessary brood of cattle 
far better than a superfluous augmentation of mankind. 
But/' he adds, severely, " I can liken such men best unto 
the Pope or the Devil," and adds that in case of invasion 
they will find " that a wall of men is far better than stacks 
of corn and bags of money." Even without the fear of 
invasion before our eyes, it is well for us to-day not to 
forget this latter sentence in the modern, international race 
for wealth. 



CHAPTER XVII 

PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND 
EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 

§ 158. RdsumS of Progress since Thirteenth Century. 

It will be remembered that great agricultural changes 
had taken place since Henry III.'s reign. For a century 
or so after his death (1272) the landowner was also a 
cultivator, living upon his land and owning a large amount 
of capital in the form of stock, which he let out under the 
stock and land lease system. 1 But after the Great Plague 
(1348) this method of cultivation by capitalist landowners 
largely ceased, except in the case of sheep-farming; the 
landowner became generally a mere rent receiver ; and 
agriculture consequently suffered to some extent. Marling, 
for instance, fell into disuse, and the breed of sheep, it is 
said, deteriorated somewhat. 2 The great feature of the 
change was the transformation of large tracts of arable land 
into pasture for sheep, and the growth of enclosures for the 
sake of the same animal. This process, however, seems to 
have ceased to some extent about the last decade of the six- 
teenth century, 3 and enclosures were afterwards made, as 
we shall see, for another reason. The landlords, meanwhile, 
rapidly proceeded to raise their rents, till, in the sixteenth 
century, extortionate renting became so common that Bishop 
Latimer, 4 and Fitzherbert, the author of the useful work on 

1 Above, pp. 114, 186. 

2 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 442, who quotes Fitzherbert ; and Hist. 
Agric, v. 52. 

3 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 52 and 180. He gives 1592 as 
about the date of cessation, with a slight increase of enclosures again 
about 1597 (Spedding, Letters and Life of Bacon, i. 158), but afterwards 
enclosures for sheep practically stopped. 

4 Latimer's Sermons (Parker Society), p. 99. 

265 



266 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

surveying, 1 complained about it both in sermons and other 
writings. For all these reasons English agriculture did not 
improve very materially between the days of Henry III. and 
of Elizabeth. But in this queen's reign, as we saw, several 
improvements were made under the influence of foreign 
refugees. For the inhabitants of the Low Countries and 
Holland have been our pioneers not only in commerce and 
finance, but in agriculture also. 2 It was these people who 
now introduced into England the cultivation of winter roots 3 
(the want of which, it will be remembered, greatly embar- 
rassed the English farmer in the mediseval winter), and in 
the eighteenth century that of artificial grasses. 4 The intro- 
duction of hops also was of great importance. 5 

§ 159. Progress in James I.'s Reign. Influence of 
Landlords. 

Of course the greatest industrial progress of this period 
was made in the direction of foreign trade, and in James's 
reign progress in agriculture was slow as compared with that 
in commerce, but it was substantial — substantial enough, 
at any rate, for the landlords to exact an increased competi- 
tive rent, as we know from Norden's work, The Surveyors 
Dialogue (1607). 6 Norden also notes 7 that tenants were 
eager to take land even at high rents, and this shows that 
they expected to make good profits. Whether they always 
made them is another question. But this development of 
competitive, as contrasted with the old customary, rents is 
certainly worthy of attention. It was, however, complained 
that the action of the landlords tended to discourage pro- 
gress, for when a tenant wished to renew a lease he was 
threatened with dispossession if he did not pay an increased 
rent for the very improvements he had made himself. 8 

1 Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 41. 2 HartUVs Legacy, p. 54, and passim. 

3 Weston, Discourse of Husbandrie used in Brabant (1652), p. 25 ; Wor- 
lidge, Systema Agricidturai, p. 46 ; Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 453. 

4 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 453. 5 Rogers, Hist. Agric, iv. 57. 

6 Dialogue, p. 9. 

7 lb. Norden, by the way, is corroborated by Best, author of Rural 
Economy in YorJcshire in 1641, p. 129. Lands (he says) which had let 
formerly at 2s. , then at 2s. 6d. , and again at 3s. , had now risen to thrice as 
much. 8 See the Preface to HartliWs Legacy, probably by Dymock. 



PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE 267 

Still, from the facts given by Norden, and also by another 
writer — Markham, the author of The English Husbandman 
(1613) — it is evident that there was considerable improve- 
ment, development, and variety now shown in English 
agriculture. 1 Arable farming was prosecuted with increased 
energy, 2 and both to farmers as well as to merchants the 
seventeenth century brought increased prosperity. 3 The 
special, characteristic feature of the seventeenth century is 
the utilisation of the fallow for roots, 4 though these had 
been known in gardens in the previous century. 5 The most 
fertile land was to be found in Huntingdon, Bedford, and 
Cambridge shires, the next best being in Northampton, 
Kent, Essex, Berkshire, and Hertfordshire. 6 Land was still 
largely cultivated in common fields, 7 and was, of course, 
much subdivided. But the practice was now increasing of 
making enclosures, not as before, for the sake of sheep- 
farming, but in order to carry on an improved method of 
tillage. 8 It was recommended by agricultural writers, 9 and 
their recommendations seem to have been widely adopted, 
though it is very doubtful whether many of those who 
enclosed land had personally read their books, for agricul- 
ture owes but little to literature. The enclosures thus made 
for tillage certainly conduced to the improvement of agri- 
culture, though in many cases it is to be feared that the 
interests of those who had a right to common lands were 
disregarded, and both the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries witnessed steady progress. 

§ 160. Writers on Agriculture. Improvements. Game. 

One noticeable improvement is the attention now paid to 
the various kinds of manures, 10 on which subject Mark ham 

1 See Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. pp. 40 to 65. 

2 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 185. 

3 Rogers, Six Centuries, 459. 4 lb., 468. 5 Above, p. 249. 

6 Markham, quoted by Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 55. 

7 It remained so in numerous instances till after the middle of the eigh- 
teenth century. Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 39. 

8 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 181. 

9 HartliVs Legacy, p. 54 ; Worlidge, Systema, p. 10 ; Taylor, Common 
Good, p. 13. 

10 Cunningham, Growth of Industry ; ii. 185; Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 52. 



268 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

was the first to write specially, though there are several 
other authors who have dealt with it. 1 The fact that 
agriculture was now made the topic of various treatises 
proves that important development was taking place. Be- 
sides the works already mentioned, we have the Sy sterna 
Agricultural by Worlidge, a farmer of Hampshire, the second 
edition of which appeared in 1675. He is a strong advo- 
cate of enclosures, as against the old common field system, 
on the plea that the former is more conducive to high farm- 
ing ; but he also is in favour of small holdings thus enclosed. 2 
Though at first local and somewhat spasmodic, and hindered 
no doubt by uncertainty of tenure 3 and by the landlord's 
power of appropriating the results of increased skill on the 
part of the tenant, under the head of " indestructible powers 
of the soil," yet the progress made was sufficient to increase 
very largely the population of England, 4 an increase aided 
also by the growth of manufactures. A curious fact in the 
agriculture of the seventeenth century may be here men- 
tioned in passing — that is, the existence of a very large 
amount of waste land, and the use made of it for purposes 
of breeding game. 5 At that time it is evident that killing 
game was not the exclusive right of the landowners, but 
was a common privilege. Large quantities of game were 
sold, and at a cheap price, and " fowling " must evidently 
have been an important item in the farmer's and labourer's 
means of livelihood. 

§ 161. Drainage of the Fens. 

A most important feature in the development of agri- 
culture in the Eastern counties was the drainage of the 
fens — i.e., all that large district which extends inward from 
the Wash into the counties of Lincoln, Cambridge, North- 
ampton, Huntingdon, Norfolk, and Suffolk. This district 

1 Blith, Husbandry, 60 ; Plato, Jewel House, 21. For an excellent 
account of these writers on agriculture see Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. pp. 40 
to 65, frequently copied by other authors. 

2 Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 62. 

3 Plattes, essay on Husbandry, quoted by Rogers, Hist. Agric., v. 56. 

4 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 463; Hist. Agric, v. 64. 

5 Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 27. 



PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE 269 

had been partly reclaimed by the Romans, and had been 
for a time a fertile country. 1 But in the time of the 
Domesday Book it was once again a mere marsh, owing to 
incursions of the sea, which the English at that time had 
not the ability to prevent. Although even in 1436, and 
subsequently, partial attempts had been made to reclaim 
this vast area, the first effectual effort was begun only in 
1634, by the Earl of Bedford, who received 95,000 acres of 
the reclaimed land as a reward for his undertaking. 2 The 
contract was fulfilled under the superintendence of the 
engineer Vermuydeu, a Dutchman, in 1649, and a corpora- 
tion was formed to manage the " Bedford level," as it was 
now called, in 1688. The reclaiming of so much land 
naturally increased the prosperity of the counties in which 
it stood, and their agriculture flourished considerably in 
consequence, Bedfordshire for instance being now the most 
exclusively agricultural county in the kingdom. Similar 
operations were effected in Hatfield Chase. 3 

§ 162. Rise of Price of Corn and of Rent 

The price of corn, meanwhile, was now steadily rising. 
From 1401 to 1540 — i.e., before the rise in prices and the 
debasements of the coinage — the average price had been a 
farthing under six shillings per quarter ; 4 after prices had 
recovered from their inflation, and settled down to a p-eneral 
average once more, taking the price from 1603 to 1702, 
corn was forty-one shillings per quarter. 5 The average 
produce had apparently declined, or, at any rate, had 
not increased since the fifteenth and before the im- 
provements of the seventeenth century. In the former 
period it was about twelve bushels per acre, 6 and in 

1 See article on Bedford Level in Chambers' Encyclopcedia (ed. 1888), 
and Denton, Fifteenth Century, pp. 140-141 ; also Smiles, Lives of the 
Engineers, Vol. I., p. 10. 

2 See more fully Gardiner, History oj England, ch. lxxxiv., Vol. VIII., 
p. 295. As the rent was, after the draining, about 30s. an acre, the earl's 
reward was very substantial. 

3 lb. , Vol. VIII. p. 292. This was in 1626, and Vermuyden was knighted 
for his efforts (1629) ; cf Smiles, Lives of the Engineers, Vol. I., for Life, 
and Works of Vermuyden, 4 Rogers, Hist. Agric, iv. 292. 

5 lb., v. 276, 6 Rogers, Econ. Interp., p, 53. 



270 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

the fourteenth century eleven bushels; 1 but Gregory King, 
writing in the seventeenth century, only gives ten or 
eleven bushels as the average of his time. 2 His estimate, 
however, is doubted. 3 At the same time, rent had risen 
from the sixpence per acre of the fifteenth century to four 
shillings, 4 according to Professor Rogers, 5 or even 5s. 6d., 
according to King, 6 who says the gains of the farmer of his 
time were very small, and that rents were more than doubled 
between 1600 and 1699. We will reserve the topic of 
the rise of rent, however, for a separate section, and keep 
to the agricultural developments of the period. 

/ § 163. Special Features of the Eighteenth Century. 
Popularity of Agriculture. 

As the use of winter roots had been the special feature 
of the seventeenth century, so the feature of the eighteenth 
was the extension of artificial pasture and the increased use 
of clover, sainfoin, and rye-grass ; 7 not, of course, that these 
had been hitherto unknown, but now their seeds were 
regularly bought and used by any farmer who knew his 
business. At first, like all other processes of agriculture, 
the development was very slow and gradual, but it went on 
steadily nevertheless. A great stimulus to progress was given 
by the fact that the English gentlemen of the eighteenth 
century developed quite a passion for agriculture as a hobby, 
and it became a fashionable pursuit for all people of any 
means, citizens and professional men joining in it as a kind 
of bye-industry, in addition to the farmers and landowners, 
who made it their business. 8 Arthur Young, the great agri- 
cultural writer of this century, declares that " the farming 
tribe is now made up of all classes, from a duke to an 
apprentice." It should also be added that in the eighteenth 

1 Rogers, Six Centuries, pp. 476 and 442. 

2 In Davenant's Works, ii. 217. 3 Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 783. 

4 Taylor, the author of the Common Good (1652), gives (p. 15) 3s. 4d. 
per acre as a typical rent in his time. 

5 Hist. Agric., v. 92. 

6 Quoted in Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 92, who gives 4s. l|d. as the average 
rental of the Belvoir estate. 

7 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 468. 8 lb., p. 470. 



PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE 271 

century more capital was being applied to the pursuit 
of agriculture. The wealth gained by the commercial 
progress of the day was largely put into the land, and the 
great revolution that now took place in English agriculture 
was carried on under the influence of men of wealth. 1 But 
two important mistakes were made in the eighteenth century, 
and they have not ceased to exist in the nineteenth, in- 
creasing very largely the distress under which English 
agriculture has for some time (1895) been labouring. They 
are the mistakes of occupying too much land with insufficient 
capital, and of not keeping regular and detailed accounts. 2 
Improvements also were not universal, but were often con- 
fined, at least at first, to scattered parts of the country. 3 
Progress was to begin with (say from l700tol760) 4 rather 
slow, but afterwards became very rapid, and wealthy land- 
owners made great efforts to improve their estates, succeeding 
also thereby in raising their rents and increasing their profits. 5 
They thus became in a way the pioneers of agricultural pro- 
gress, the principal result of their efforts being seen in the in- 
creased number and quality of the stock now kept on farms. 

§ 164. Improvements of Cattle, and in the Productiveness 
of Land. Statistics. 

The extended cultivation of winter roots, clover, and 
other grasses naturally made it far easier for the farmer to 
feed his animals in the winter ; and the improvement in 
stock followed closely upon the improvement in fodder. 6 
The abundance of stock, too, had again a beneficial result 

1 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 362. 

2 Arthur Young, quoted in Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 471. 

3 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 41. 4 lb., p. 45. 

5 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 363, 364, following Young, praises 
these wealthy landowners for their efforts, and expresses surprise that 
later writers have attacked such men for raising rents and for other reasons. 
No doubt the landowners are entitled to every praise for their spirited 
efforts, but to call a man (as Young practically does) the greatest of 
patriots for following the obvious course of enlightened self-interest is 
little less than absurd. A landlord who makes a profit out of his land by 
improvements in husbandry deserves such a title as little, or as much, as a. 
manufacturer who derives a handsome profit from a new machine.. 

6 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 475. 



272 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

in the production of increased quantities of manure, and 
the utilisation of fertilisers was more scientifically devel- 
oped. The useful, though costly, process of marling was 
again revived, and was advocated by Arthur Young ; soils 
were also treated with clay, chalk, or lime. 1 So great was 
the improvement thus made, that the productiveness of 
land in the eighteenth century rose to four times that of 
the thirteenth century, when five bushels or eight bushels 
of corn per acre was the average. 2 Stock, also, was 
similarly improved ; an eighteenth century fatted ox often 
weighed over 800 lbs., 3 while hitherto, from the fourteenth 
to the end of the seventeenth century, the weight had not 
been usually much above 400 lbs. The weight of the 
fleece of sheep had also increased quite four times. 4 Popu- 
lation being even then small, a considerable quantity of 
corn was exported, the British farmer being also protected 
from foreign competition by the corn laws (made in Charles 
II. 's reign), 5 forbidding importation of corn, except when it 
rose to famine prices. Young 6 estimated the cultivated 
acreage of the country at 32,000,000 acres, arable and pas- 
ture being in equal proportions, whereas King 7 had put it at 
only 22,000,000 in the seventeenth century ; its value (at 
thirty-three and one-half years' purchase) was, says Young, 
£536,000,000. The value of stock he places at nearly 
£110,000,000, and estimates the wheat and rye crop at 
over 9,000,000 quarters per annum, barley at 11,500,000 
quarters, and oats at 10,250,000 quarters. The rent of land 
had risen in Young's time to nearly ten shillings an acre, 8 

1 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 476. 

2 lb., 477 ; cf. also Young, who gives 25 bushels an acre (in 1770), while 
in France it was only 18 bushels. Travels in France, i. 354. 

3 Cf. Eden, State of the Poor, i. 334 ; Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, 
44, but Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 477, gives 1200 lbs. 4 lb., p. 477. 

5 See the 22 Charles II., c. 13, by which a duty of 16s. a qr. was placed 
on wheat when at or below 53s. 4d. , and a duty of 8s. when it was between 
53s. 4d. and 80s. a qr. Other kinds of grain were similarly treated. 
We have seen that the average price of wheat at this time was 41s. a qr. ; 
hence the effect of this law may be easily perceived. 

6 Northern Tour, iv. 340-341, but cf. Eastern Tour, iv. 455. 

7 Observations upon the State and Condition of England, 1696 ; printed in 
Chalmers' Estimate, p. 52. 

s Cf. Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 477 ', but also cf. Hist. Agric, v. 29, 



PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE 273 

§ 165. Survivals of Primitive Culture. Common Fields. 

With all these improvements, however, rural England, 
even as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, 
retained in its husbandry many traces of a more primitive 
state of things. Again and again the permanence of 
ancient institutions and methods surprises us, here as 
elsewhere, just as Arthur Young was surprised in his tours 
through his own country. Thus at Boynton (Yorks) Young 
found remains of extensive culture ; * in other cases the 
old two-field or three-field system was carried on ; as, for 
instance, near Ecclesfield in Hallamshire, and at Beverley iD 
Yorkshire. 2 Throughout considerable districts, in fact, the 
agrarian system of the middle ages still remained in force ; 3 
and naturally, compared with the newer methods of agri- 
culture, it yielded but poor results. " Never," says Arthur 
Young, " were more miserable crops seen than the spring 
ones in the common fields ; absolutely beneath contempt." 4 
The causes of this backward state of things were many, 
but all naturally arose from the difficulties inherent in the 
common field system when some of those who used it had 
surpassed their co-workers in agricultural progress. 5 For 
one thing the same course of crops was nearly always 
necessary, and no proper rotation was feasible, the only 
possible alteration being to vary the proportions of different 
white-straw crops. 6 

A man of enterprise was therefore greatly hindered ; for 
if he worked with his neighbours in these open fields he 
was compelled to follow a traditional but unprogressive 
course of husbandry agaiust his better judgment. Then, 
again, much time was lost by labourers and cattle travel- 
ling to many dispersed pieces of land from one end of 
the parish to another. 7 There were continuous quarrels 
among neighbours about rights of pasture in the meadows, 

1 Northern Tour, ii. 7. 2 Ib., ii. 1, cf also i. 126. 

3 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 39. 

4 Southern Tour, p. 384 (ed. 1772). 

5 Cf. Toynbee, Indust. Revolution, p. 40, and Cunningham, Growth of 
Industry, ii. p. 370. 

6 Toynbee, Indust. Revolution, p. 40. 

7 Young, View of the Agriculture of Oxfordshire, p. 100. 

S 



2;4 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

and in the stubbles after the harvest ; and the question of 
boundaries was another fruitful source of dispute; for we 
are told that in some common fields there were no " baulks/' 
or strips of unused land to divide the holdings, and men 
would plough by night to steal a furrow from their neigh- 
bours. 1 Hence it is not surprising that those who followed 
the new agriculture also encouraged the practice of 
enclosures. The old methods had to give way to the 
new, and these were hardly possible on unenclosed land ; 
and therefore we note, together with the progress of agri- 
culture, a simultaneous increase in the amount of land 
enclosed. 

§ 166. Great Increase of Enclosures. 

The abolition of the old system was necessary, but the 
manner in which it was carried out was often disastrous. The 
enclosures made by the landowners were frequently carried 
on with little regard to the interests of the smaller tenants 
and freeholders, who, in fact, suffered greatly ; 2 and in the 
present age English agriculture is, in a large measure, still 
feeling the subsequent effects of this change, especially in 
regard to the size of holdings, while many people are ad- 
vocating a partial return to small farms, cultivated, how- 
ever, with the improved experience given by modern 
agricultural progress. Certainly this was not the first 
occasion on which the landowners had made enclosures and 
encroached upon the common lands of their poorer neigh- 
bours, and not merely upon the waste ; 3 but the rapidity 
and boldness of the enclosing operations at the end of the 
eighteenth century far surpassed anything in previous 

1 Young, View of the Agriculture of Oxfordshire, p. 239 ; Toynbee, Indust. 
Rev., p. 40. 

2 " Though we cannot pretend to estimate the extent of the evil, there 
is no reason to doubt its reality. Enclosure was carried on by means of 
private bills ; these were passed through Parliament without sufficient 
inquiry and when many of the inhabitants were quite unaware of the 
impending change or powerless to resist it." Cunningham, Growth of 
Industry, ii. 486. 

3 Arthur Young found that out of 37 parishes which had been enclosed 
there were only 12 in which the labourers had not been injured. Annals 
of Agriculture, xxxvl. 513. 



PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE 275 

times. Between 1710 and 1760, for instance, only 
334,974 acres were enclosed; 1 but between 1760 and 
1843 the number rose to 7,000,000. 2 

§ 167. Benefits of Enclosures as Compared %vith the Old 
Common Fields. 

The benefits of the enclosure system were, however, un- 
mistakable, for the cultivation of common fields under the 
old system 3 was, as Arthur Young assures us, miserably 
poor. This system produced results far inferior to those 
gained on enclosed lands, the crop of wheat in one instance 
being, according to Young, only seventeen or eighteen 
bushels per acre, as against twenty-six bushels on en- 
closures. 4 Similarly, the fleece of sheep pastured on com- 
mon fields weighed only 3 J lbs., as compared with 9 
lbs. on enclosures. 5 It is noticeable, too, that Kent, 
where much land had for a long time been enclosed, 
was reckoned in Young's time the best cultivated and 
most fertile county in England. 6 Norfolk, also, was pre- 
eminent for good husbandr}^, 7 in its excellent rotation 
of crops and culture of clover, rye-grass, and winter roots, 
due, said Young in 1770, to the division of the county 
chiefly into large farms. 8 " Great farms have been the 

1 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, 38, 39. 

2 lb., quoting Shaw Lefevre, The English and Irish Land Question, p. 
199. The General Report on Enclosures, p. 46 (Board of Agriculture), 
gives 4,187,056 as the acreage enclosed from Queen Anne's reign to 1805 
only. 

3 It may be well to summarise it again briefly. The arable land of each 
village under this system was still divided into three great strips, sub- 
divided by "baulks" three yards wide. Every farmer would own one 
piece of land in each strip — probably more — and all alike were bound to 
follow the customary tillage ; this was to leave one strip fallow every 
year, while on one of the other two wheat was always grown, the third 
being occupied by barley or oats, pease or tares. The meadows, also, 
were still held in common, every man having his own plot up to hay 
harvest, after which the fences were thrown down, and all householders' 
cattle were allowed to graze on it freely, while for the next crop the plots 
were redistributed. Every farmer also had the right of pasture on the 
waste. 

4 At Risby, Yorks ; see Northern Tour, i. 160-162, 
6 Northern Tour, iv. 190. 

6 Eastern Tour, iii. 108-109 ; Northern Tour, i. 292. 

7 Eastern Tour, ii. 150. 8 lb., ii. 160, 161. 



276 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

soul of the Norfolk culture." These would have been im- 
possible without enclosing land, and it is clear that great 
advantages were derived from this practice. Essex, again, 
was a county notable for its progressive husbandry, and 
one of the first in which turnips were introduced as a root 
crop ; 1 and Essex had been noted for its enclosures for 
many generations. 2 But, in spite of these advantages, 
there was one gloomy feature in this new agricultural epoch 
which cannot be lightly passed over. I refer to the decay 
of the yeomen, who, at one time, were the chief glory of 
the agricultural life of mediaeval England. 

§ 168. The Decay of the Yeomanry. 

For centuries the yeoman had held an honoured position 
in English history, and as lately as the reign of Elizabeth, 
he is alluded to in sympathetic and admiring terms by the 
descriptive Harrison. " This sort of people," he says, " have 
a certain pre-eminence and more estimation than labourers 
and the common sort of artificers, and these commonly live 
wealthily, keep good houses, and travel to get riches. They 
are also for the most part farmers to gentlemen, or at the 
leastwise artificers; and with grazing, frequenting of markets, 
and keeping of servants, do come to great wealth, insomuch 
that many of them are able to, and do, buy the lands of 
unthrifty gentlemen, and often setting their sons to the 
schools, to the Universities, and to the Inns of Court, or 
otherwise leaving them sufficient lands whereon they ma}' 
live without labour, do make them by those means to 
become gentlemen. These were they that in times past 
made all France afraid. And albeit they be not called 
' master/ as gentlemen are, or ' Sir,' as to knights apper- 
tained, but only ' John ' and ' Thomas/ yet have they 
been found to have done very good service. The kings of 
England in foughten battles were wont to remain among 
them (who were their footmen), as the French kings did 

1 In 1694. See quotation from Houghton, Collections in Husbandry and 
Trade in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, s. v. Agriculture. 

2 Above, p. 215. 



PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE 277 

amongst their horsemen, the prince thereby shewing where 
his chief strength did consist." 1 

The decline of this sturdy body of small farmers forms a 
sad interlude in the growing prosperity of the country, and 
is due to a combination of various causes. Among these 
we may place the " Statute of Frauds," of 1677, not indeed 
as a primary cause, but as having a weakening effect upon 
the position of the yeomen, and contributing in some degree 
to assist other causes which made themselves felt more 
keenly in the eighteenth century. By this somewhat high- 
handed Act 2 it was decreed that after July 24th, 10 7 7, 
all interests in land whatsoever, if created by any other 
process except by deed, should be treated as tenancies at 
will only, any law or usage to the contrary notwithstanding. 
The intention, apparently, of those who passed this law — 
an intention which in the end resulted successfully — was 
to extinguish all those numerous small freeholders who 
had no written evidence to prove that they held their lands, 
as they had done for centuries, on condition of paying a 
small fixed and customary rent. 3 This Act certainly 
succeeded in dispossessing many of the class at which it 
was aimed ; but there were yet a certain number against 
whom it was inoperative ; hence, at the end of the seven- 
teenth century, twenty years or so after it was passed, 
Gregory King is able to estimate that there were 180,000 
freeholders in England, including, of course, the larger 
owners. 4 But by the time of Arthur Young these also had 
disappeared, or at least were rapidly disappearing, 5 and he 
sincerely regrets " to see their lands now in the hands of 
monopolising lords." 6 This view is the more remarkable as 
coming from Arthur Young, because he was an ardent 
advocate of the new agriculture and large farms ; but as a 

1 Harrison, Description of England, Bk. III. ch. iv. (edn. 1577), page 
13, Camelot Series edn. 

8 The 29 Charles II., c. 3. 3 Cf Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 15, 87. 

4 See Macaulay, History of England, ch. iii., who thinks this too high, 
and suggests 160,000. 

8 In 1787 they had practically disappeared in most parts of the country. 
Young, Travels in France, i. 86, ii 262 (edn. 1793). 

6 Young, Inquiry into the Present Price of Provisions and Size of Farms 
(1773), pp. 126, 139. 



278 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

practical man he could see what a loss the vanished yeoman 
was to his country. The curious thing about their dis- 
appearance is its comparative rapidity. 1 Of course many 
yeomen existed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, 
and a few still remain at the end of it ; but there was a 
sudden and remarkable diminution in their numbers during 
the century just before Arthur Young wrote (1700-1800). 
At the close of the seventeenth century a writer on the 
State of Great Britain 2 was able to say that the free- 
holders of England were " more in number and richer than 
in any country of the like extent in Europe. £40 or £50 
is very ordinary, £1 00 or ,£200 in some counties is not 
rare ; sometimes in Kent and in the Weald of Sussex, 
£500 or £600 per annum, and £3000 or £4000 stock." 
The evidence, says an eminent economist, 3 is conclusive 
that up to the Revolution of 1688 the yeomen freeholders 
were in most parts of the country an important feature in 
social life. 

We may therefore well inquire into the reasons of their 
decay. 

§ 169. Causes of the Decay of the Yeomanry. 

The cause was partly political and partly social. After 
the revolution of 1688, the landed gentry became politically 
and socially supreme, 4 and any successful merchant prince 
— and these were not few — who wished to gain a footing, 
sought, in the first place, to imitate them by becoming 
a great landowner; hence it became quite a policy to 
buy out the smaller farmers, 5 who were often practically 
compelled to sell their holdings. At the same time, the 
custom of primogeniture and strict settlements prevented 
land from being much subdivided, so that small or divided 

1 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 59, whom see for his special chapter 
on the decay of the yeomanry. 

2 Chamberlayne, State of Great Britain, Part I., Book III. p. 176 (edn. 
1737). First published in 1669. 

3 Toynbee, u. s., p. 60. 4 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 62. 
5 lb., 63, 64, who quotes Laurence's Duty of a Steward (1727), p. 36. 

Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 379, says they were not bought out 
then, but his assertion seems unsupported by any adequate evidence. He 
admits, however, that "in subsequent years they were forced to sell." 



PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE 279 

estates rarely came into the market for the smaller free- 
holders to buy. 1 It is also certain that this result was 
accelerated by the fact that small farms no longer paid 
under the old system of agriculture, and the new system 
involved an outlay which the yeoman could not afford. 2 
The yeomanry were superseded by capitalist farmers and 
agricultural labourers. 3 Farming on a large scale became 
more necessary, and this again assisted in extinguishing the 
smaller men, for large enclosures were made by the landed 
gentry in spite of feeble opposition from the yeomen, 4 who, 
however, could rarely afford to pay the law costs necessary 
to put a stop to the encroachments of their greater neigh- 
bours. Later on, at the beginning of the nineteenth century 
(especially in 1801) the burden of the ever-increasing poor- 
rates — a direct consequence of the Poor Law and assessment 
system introduced by the Act of Elizabeth 5 — largely aided in 
their ruin, for since the labourers were not and could not be 
maintained by the wages which their employers paid them, 
it followed that the small holders were taxed for the benefit 
of the large farmers. 6 The finishing stroke to a rapidly 
decaying class was given by the fall in prices after the great 
Continental War (1815), following on the inflation of pre- 
vious years ; 7 and as their small properties came into the 
market and no holders of their own class appeared to take 
their place, 8 their lands went to swell the large farms that 
were now the typical feature of British agriculture. Here 
and there an occasional representative of a once large and 
worthy body of men still remains (1895), but the English 
yeoman of the days of Henry V. and Queen Elizabeth, as a 
class, has disappeared entirely. 9 

§ 170. The Rise in Bent 
The farmer, meanwhile, was heavily taxed for his land, and 
though the high prices which he obtained for his corn up to 

1 Toynbee, u. s., p. 64; and Lecky, History, i. 196. 

2 Toynbee, p. 65, and Cunningham, u. s. , ii. 480. 

3 Cunningham, ii. 364, 480. 

4 Cf. the case of Pickering, Yorks ; Marshall's Yorkshire, p. 54 ; Toyn- 
bee, Ind. Rev., p. 65. 5 Above, p. 262. 

6 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 478. 7 lb., p. 479. 8 lb. 

9 Cf. also Lecky, History of the Eighteenth Century, i. p. 196. 



280 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

the repeal of the corn laws enabled him to pay it, his rent was 
certainly at a very high figure. The rise had begun, as we 
have seen, after the dissolution of the monasteries in the 
sixteenth century, though in that period it was slow. But 
Latimer asserts x that his father only paid £3 or £4 for a 
holding which in the next generation was rented at £16, 
the increased figure being only partially accounted for by 
the general rise in prices. In the seventeenth century, 
according to King, 2 rents were more than doubled, and the 
sixpence per acre of mediaeval times must have seemed 
almost mythical. The Belvoir estate, the property of the 
Dukes of Rutland, who are spoken of as indulgent landlords, 
forms a good example of the rise of rent in the two following 
centuries. 3 In 1692 land is found rented at 3s. 9Jd. an 
acre, and a little later at 4s. ljd. By the year 1799 the 
same land had risen to 19s. 3fd., with a further rise in 
1812 to 25s. 8|d. In 1830 it was at 25s. lfd., but in 
1850 had risen to 38s. 8d., that is about ten times the 
seventeenth century rent. This enormous rise could not 
have been due solely to increase of skill in agricultural 
industry, but was partly derived from artificial conditions 
imposed by the corn laws, and partly from increased 
economy in production, this economy often meaning the 
oppression and degradation of the agricultural labourer. 

§ 171. The Fall in Wages. 

This degradation was, if not brought about, yet at least 
greatly assisted by the system of assessment of wages which 
we noticed in Elizabeth's reign, a system under which the 
labourer was forced by law to accept the wages which the 
justices (generally the landed proprietors, his employers) 
arranged to give him. It is not the business of an historian 
to make charges against a class, but to put facts in their 
due perspective. Therefore without comment upon the 
action of the justices in this matter I shall merely refer to 
one or two of these assessments and show their effect upon 
the condition of labour, especially of agricultural labour, 

1 Above, p. 213. 2 Above, p. 270. 

3 Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 29 ; cf. also Six Centuries, p. 479, 



PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE 281 

which occupied, till Arthur Young's time, more than one- 
third of the working-classes. 1 Speaking generally for the 
end of the sixteenth century, we may quote Professor 
Rogers' remark, that " if we suppose the ordinary labourer 
to get 3s. 6d. a week throughout the year, by adding his 
harvest allowance to his winter wages, it would have taken 
him more than forty weeks to earn the provisions which in 
1495 he could have got with fifteen weeks' labour, while 
the artisan would be obliged to have given thirty- two weeks' 
work for the same result." 2 I have already given a table 3 of 
some of these assessments, and we may take in detail, as an 
example, the one made by the Rutland magistrates in April 
1610. The wages of an ordinary agricultural labourer are 
put at 7d. a day from Easter to Michaelmas, and at 6d. 
from Michaelmas to Easter. Artisans get lOd. or 9d. in 
summer, and 8d. in winter. Now, the price of food was 
75 per cent, dearer than in 1564, while the rate of wages 
was about the same ; and compared with (say) 1495, food 
was three, or even four, times dearer. Another assessment, 
in Essex in 1661, allows Is. a day in winter, and Is. 2d. 
in summer, for ordinary labour. But, in 1661, the price 
of wheat (70s. 6d. a quarter) was just double the price of 
1610 (35s. 2|d.). The labourer was worse off than ever. 
Another typical assessment is that of Warwick, in 1684, 
when wages of labourers are fixed at 8d. a day in summer, 
7d. in winter ; of artisans at Is. a day. At this period 
Professor Rogers 4 reckons the yearly earnings of an artisan 
at £15, 13s. ; of a farm labourer at £10, 8s. 8d., exclusive 
of harvest work ; while the cost of a year's stock of pro- 
visions was £14, lis. 6d. It is true that at this period 
the labourers still possessed certain advantages afterwards 
lost, such as common rights, 5 which, besides providing 
fuel, enabled them to keep cows, pigs, and poultry on the 
waste. Their cottages, too, were often rent free, being 

1 That is 2,800,000 out of 8,500,000 in 1769 ; Young, Northern Tour, iv. 
417-419, 364. 

2 Kogers, Six Centuries, p. 390. 3 Above, p. 257. 

4 Six Centuries, p. 395. 

5 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 487 ; and Young, Annals of Agri- 
culture, xxxvi, 516, 



282 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

built upon the waste, 1 while each cottage, by an Act of 
Elizabeth, 2 was supposed to have a piece of land attached 
to it, though this provision, after being frequently evaded, 
was finally repealed in 1775. But yet it is evident that, 
even allowing for these privileges, which, after all, were 
now being rapidly curtailed, the ordinary agricultural 
labourer — that is, the mass of the wage-earning population 
— must have found it hard work to live decently. There 
was, however, a short interval of higher wages during the 
Civil War and the commonwealth, 3 the rise being due not 
only to the demand of all sorts of stores for the contending 
armies, but also to the demand for men to recruit their 
forces. 4 Artisans could get 2s. 6d. a day instead of 6d., 5 
and the rise thus brought about did not immediately dis- 
appear. But prices were still rising steadily, and wages 
did not follow them closely enough to prevent great distress 
among the working-classes. At the end of the seventeenth 
century starvation rates of pay are complained of by the 
well-known Sir Matthew Hale 6 (1683), and twenty years 
before that the increase of pauperism had necessitated the 
passing of that Act of Settlement which afterwards became 
so unpleasantly celebrated. 7 There are historians who 
maintain that the Elizabethan system of assessment of 
wages was not responsible for these evils ; but even if not 
responsible it certainly encouraged them ; and not even 
the most enthusiastic admirers of that unfortunate Act can 
deny that wages were never affected by it beneficially, but 
continued to decline with remarkable persistency. 8 By the 

1 Young, Farmer's Letters, i. 205 (edn. 1771). 2 The 31 Eliz., c. 7. 

3 Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 98 ; Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 194. 

4 See Pari. Hist., ii. 10. 

5 A quotation from Reasons for a Limited Exportation of Wool, 1677, in 
Smith's Chronicon Busticum, i. 257. 

6 Provision for Poor (1683), p. 18. 

7 The 13 and 14 Charles II., c. 12. Briefly it gave a parish power to 
remove a new comer within 40 days, and send him back to the parish 
where he was legally settled, if he was likely to require relief from the 
rates. This practically chained the labourer to his native parish. See 
below, p. 416, and cf. Fowle, Poor Law, p. 64. 

8 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 200, remarks : " During this period 
there were considerable fluctuations of prices ; the Cambridge wheat rents 
for 1654-5 are at 24s. 9|d., and those for 1658-59 at 52s. 2|d. Yet though 



PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE 283 

beginning of the eighteenth century the condition of the 
labourer had sunk to one of great poverty. The ordinary 
peasant, in 1725, for instance, would not earn more than 
about £13 or £15 a year; artisans could not gain more 
than £15, 13s.; while the cost of the stock of provisions was 
£16, 2s. 3d. 1 Thus the husbandman who, in 1495, could 
get a similar stock of food by fifteen weeks' work, and the 
artisan who could have earned it in ten weeks, could not 
feed himself in 1725 with a whole year's labour. 2 His 
wages had to be supplemented out of the rates ; and there 
was but little alteration in these wages till the middle of 
the eighteenth century. But about that time (1750) he 
had begun to share in the general prosperity caused by the 
success of the new agriculture and the growth of trade and 
manufactures. Whereas in the seventeenth century his 
average daily wages had been 10jd., and the price of corn 
38s. 2d., in the first sixty years of the eighteenth century 
wages had risen to Is., and the price of corn was only 32s. 3 
The evil, however, had been done, and although a short 
period of prosperity, chiefly due to the advance made by 
the new agriculture and manufactures, cheered the labourer 
for a time, his condition after the Industrial Revolution 
deteriorated again rapidly, till we find him at the end of 
the eighteenth century, and for some time afterwards, in a 
condition of chronic misery. 

the price of corn was doubled in this brief period, the Bedford justices do 
not seem to have felt called upon to make any new order or to try to 
enforce a different rate of wages." This is not surprising; it merely 
illustrates what I have remarked before about the temptations of the 
Assessment Act to employers (above, pp. 255, 256). Yet Dr Cunningham 
seems to think the assessment system had no influence on wages. 

1 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 398. 2 lb. 

3 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 67. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

COMMERCE AND WAR IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND 
EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 

§ 172. England a Commercial Power. 

In glancing over the progress of foreign trade in the time 
of Elizabeth, we noticed that our war with Spain was due 
to commercial as well as to religious causes. The opening 
up of the New World had made a struggle for power in the 
West now almost inevitable among European nations ; the 
new route to India round the Cape of Good Hope, discovered 
by Vasco di Gama, made another struggle for commercial 
supremacy as inevitable in the far East. But England was 
certainly slow in entering the field. As a matter of fact, 
she was hardly yet ready either in industry, commerce, or 
political power. In the reign of Henry VIII. English sea- 
men had not yet ventured far into the Mediterranean, 1 and 
even in the last years of Queen Elizabeth England had 
absolutely no possessions outside Europe, for every scheme 
of colonial settlement had failed. 2 For a century or more 
after the discoveries of Columbus and di Gama, Spain and 
Portugal, and a little later on Holland, had practically a 
monopoly both of the Eastern and Western trade. But now 
a change had come. The Englishmen of the Elizabethan 
age cast off their fear of Spain, and entered into rivalry 
with Holland, till their descendants finally made England 
the supreme commercial power of the modern world. The 
history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a 
continuous record of their struggles to attain this object. 
War is, in fact, their characteristic feature, and it had 
everywhere the same purpose. 3 

1 Cf. above, p. 225. Rogers, Hist. Agric, iv. 146, says they had not ven- 
tured further than Malaga, quoting a Statute of Henry VIII. (32 Hen. 
VIII., c. 14). 

2 Seeley, Expansion of England, p. 9, s lb., pp. 20, 21. 

984 



COMMERCE AND WAR 285 

§ 173. The Beginnings of the Struggle with Spain,. 

In the last quarter of the sixteenth centur}^ Elizabeth 
had entered (1577) into an alliance, offensive and defensive, 
with Holland against Spain. 1 The motive of the alliance 
was partly religious, but the shrewd queen and her equally 
shrewd statesmen doubtless foresaw more than spiritual 
advantages to be gained thereby. After the alliance, Drake 
and the other great sea-captains of that day began a system 
of buccaneering annoyances to Spanish commerce. 2 The 
Spanish and Portuguese trade and factories in the East were 
considered the lawful prizes of the English and of their allies 
the Dutch. The latter, as all know, were more successful 
at first than we were, and soon established an Oriental 
Empire in the Indian Archipelago. But at the very end of 
her reign England had prospered sufficiently for Elizabeth 
to grant charters to the Levant Company (1581), s and its 
far greater off-shoot, the East India Company (1600). 4 
Then, when a fresh war with Spain was imminent, England 
wisely began to plant colonies in North America, at the 
suggestion of Sir Walter Raleigh ; 5 and after one or two 
other abortive attempts, Virginia was successfully founded 
by the London Company 6 in 160$, and became a Crown 
colony 7 in 1624. After this, as every one knows, colonies 
grew rapidly on the strip of coast between the Alleghany 
Mountains and the Atlantic. Meanwhile, on the other side 
of the world the East India Company was slowly gaining 
ground, and founding English agencies or " factories," that 
of Surat (in 1612) being the most important. 8 As yet we 
had not come into open conflict with Spain or Portugal ; 
and, indeed, we owed the possession of Bombay 9 to the 
marriage of Charles II. with Katherine of Braganza (1668). 
Then the Company gained from Charles II. the important 

1 Green, History, ii. 410. 

2 Green, History, ii. 424, 425 ; Froude, History, viii. 440, ix. 337. 

3 Craik, History of British Commerce, i. 251, ii. 19. 

4 lb., i. 253, ii. 13 sqq. 5 Hakluyt, iii. 243, 263, 280. 

6 The first charter given by James I. was in 1606, but the chief settle- 
ment was made in 1600. Cf Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 144. 

7 lb., ii. 146. 8 Of. Craik, British Commerce, ii. 16. 
9 Annals of England, p. 473. 



286 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

privilege of making peace or war on its own account. 1 
It had a good many foes to contend with, both among 
natives and European nations, among whom the French 2 
were as powerful as the Portuguese. But it is curious to 
note how in every part of the colonial world England has 
been the last to come to the front. In the New World 
Spain and France, in the East the Portuguese and Dutch, 
and later in Africa and Australia the Dutch again — all 
were before her. For a great colonising power it is re- 
markable how invariably she has let others lead the way. 

§ 174. Cromwell's Commercial Wars and the Navi- 
gation Acts. 

The monopoly of Spain was first definitely attacked as 
a matter of policy by Cromwell, for the deeds of the Eliza- 
bethan seamen were not always recognised by the State. 
James I. had been too timid to declare war, and Charles I. 
was too much in danger himself to think of trusting his 
subjects to support him if he did so. But Cromwell was 
supported both by the religious views of the Puritans and 
by the desires of the merchants when he declared war 
against England's great foe. 3 He demanded trade with the 
Spanish colonies, and religious freedom for English settlers 
in such colonies. Of course his demands were refused, as 
he well knew that they would be. Thereupon he seized 
Jamaica (1655), though he failed to secure Cuba ; 4 and at 
any rate succeeded in giving the English a secure footing 
in the West Indies. He seized Dunkirk also (1658) from 
Spain (then at war with France), 5 with a view to securing for 
England a monopoly of the Channel to the exclusion of her 
former friends the Dutch. Dunkirk, however, «was a useless 
acquisition, and was sold again 6 by Charles II. Not 
content with victory in the West, Cromwell, with the full 
consent of mercantile England, declared war against the 

1 Craik, British Commerce, ii. 101. 

2 Seeley, Expansion of England, p. 284. 

3 Seeley, Expansion, p. 32 ; Cunningham, ii. 150. 

4 Thurloe, State Papers, iv. 40 ; Annals of England, p. 452. 

5 Annals of England, p. 453. 

6 In 1662, October 27th, for five million livres. 



COMMERCE AND WAR 287 

Dutch, who were now more our rivals than our friends. It 
would have been perfectly possible for the English and 
the Dutch to have remained upon good terms ; but the 
great idea of the statesmen and merchants of the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries was to gain a sole market 
and a monopoly of trade, and therefore they thought the Dutch 
ought to be crushed. The method adopted was shown in the 
famous Navigation Act 1 of 1651, which forbade the import 
or export of any goods between Asia, Africa, America, and 
England, unless these were carried in English ships manned 
by English crews. This Act was confirmed by another 2 
of 1661, which not only laid down the above conditions, 
but added that the ships must be English built and 
owned by Englishmen ; and these Acts continued in opera- 
tion till early in the nineteenth century. As to their effect, 
there has been great diversity of opinion ; and speaking 
solely from the point of view of theoretical economics, there 
would seem no doubt that they were decidedly harmful, as 
being an attempt to maintain for a single country a mono- 
poly that would naturally be shared by others. A monopoly 
generally implies an unnecessary tax upon some portion of 
the community for the benefit of another portion, and it 
has been complained that these Navigation Laws benefited 
the shipping interest at the expense of the rest of the 
nation. 3 It has further been pointed out (even by writers 
of that time) 4 that our general commerce was injuriously 
affected by " lessening the resort of strangers to our ports," 
and also that after all it did not really increase English 
trade/ but that the Eastland and Baltic trade had actually 
diminished. Other objections are that the Colonies and 
also English producers were restricted in their dealings and 
unable to obtain the best market for some of their pro- 
ducts ; 6 and again that, however beneficial their ultimate 
results may have been, the enormous expenses 7 incurred 

1 Act c. 22 of 1651 (Commonwealth). 2 Act 12 Charles II., c. 18. 

3 Craik, British Commerce, ii. 91. 

4 Roger Coke, Treatise on Trade (1671). 

5 Sir Josiah Child, Treatise on Trade (1698). 

6 Child, New Discourse, p. 115. 

7 Alluded to by Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 110. 



288 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

by the wars with the Dutch which followed them counter- 
balanced for a long time any advantages which they 
procured. 

But it has been truly urged that the legislators who made 
these celebrated laws were perfectly aware of all the dis- 
advantages they entailed, but considered 1 that the growth 
of national power would be on the whole fostered, the reserve 
for the navy strengthened, and the rivalry of the Dutch in 
course of time annihilated. And, as a matter of fact, all 
these things came to pass. More especially it has been 
contended that they helped to defend the country against 
foreign foes, although they might hamper trade. For this 
reason Adam Smith, 2 speaking as a politician and not as an 
economist, eulogises these Acts in the concise remark : " As 
defence is much more important than opulence, the Act of 
Navigation is perhaps the wisest of all the commercial 
regulations of England." This dictum of so great an 
economist is worthy of the utmost consideration, for it shows 
us that there are occasions when economics must give way 
to politics, and that political economy best bears out its title 
as a science when it remembers that it is qualified by the 
attribute "political." 

On the whole, then, with all their evils, the Navigation 
Acts were perhaps not so great a mistake as the nineteenth 
century economist is at first inclined to suppose. At any 
rate, Cronrwell succeeded in his immediate object. The 
Dutch were provoked into a war in which their prestige was 
broken and their trade greatly injured ; and before long the 
contest between them and the English for the mastery of 
the seas was practically decided. By the end of the seven- 
teenth century Holland had to own her defeat, and England 
began distinctly to take the lead in commerce. 3 

§ 175. The Wars of William, III. and of Anne. 

But the wars with Holland were on]y the beginnings of 
a larger struggle in which England contended against all 

1 Alluded to by Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 112. 

2 Wealth of Nations, Bk. IV. ch. ii. (ii. 38, Clarendon Press edn.). His 
whole discussion of them should be read. 

3 Cf. Seeley, Expansion of England, 86. 



COMMERCE AND WAR 289 

Western Europe — a struggle that was to last with com- 
paratively brief intermissions til] well into the nineteenth 
century. The continental wars in which England was 
engaged after the deposition of James II. were rendered 
necessary to some extent by the tremendous power of France 
under Louis XIV. William III. saw it was inevitable for 
the interests of England that Louis XIV. should be checked, 
and the war of the Spanish Succession (1702-13) was 
carried on with the object of preventing that king from 
joining the resources of Spain to those of his own kingdom. 
For if he had done so, two disastrous results would have 
happened. The Stuarts would by his help have been 
restored to the English throne, and the struggle against 
absolute monarchy and religious tyranny would unfortunately 
have been fought over again. Secondly, the growth of 
English commerce and colonies would have been checked, 
if not utterly annihilated. Here the real point of conten- 
tion between England and France was the New World. 
The Spanish Succession, remote as it seemed, concerned 
Englishmen, because France threatened by her close alliance 
and influence with Spain to enter into the Spanish monopoly 
of the New World and to keep England out of it. 1 Hence 
the most practical results of the war were seen in the ac- 
quisition of colonial power. 2 We were not only preserved 
from the Stuarts, but also, when the war was finally over 
in 1713, found ourselves in possession of Gibraltar, now 
one of the keys of our Indian Empire, and of the Hudson's 
Bay Territory, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia (then called 
Acadia) — the foundations of our present Canadian dominion. 
England was also allowed by Spain the monopoly of the 
trade in negroes with Spanish colonies, 3 and to send one 
ship a year to the South Seas. The war, as far as we were 
concerned, was a commercial success, though we had to pay 
rather heavily for it, and were involved in further difficul- 
ties in America afterwards. 

1 Seeley, Expansion of England, pp. 32 and 33. 2 lb. 

3 This is known as the " Assiento " contract (Art. 12 of the Treaty of 
1713). The English had the monopoly of the slave trade for 30 years, but 
practically till war broke out again in 1739. The contract was renewed 
for 4 years in 1748, but not at the Peace of 1763. 

T 



290 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

§ 176. English Colonies. 

It will be seen that by this time (1713) England had 
definitely entered the field as a colonial power, and was 
anxious to extend her colonial possessions. She had not 
shown any great desire for them in earlier years ; in fact, 
we have already remarked that she was then, as she always 
has been, the last to enter upon a colonising career. But 
now England was fired by the example of other nations. 
The motives, however, for our early schemes of colonisation 
were rather mixed. It certainly cannot be said that our 
colonies were a natural " expansion " of the mother country, 
and the use of this term, 1 expansion, is apt to be mis- 
leading ; for England was certainly by no means over- 
populated in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. In 
fact, it was then even complained that colonies would drain 
away population which we could ill afford to spare. 2 There 
can be little doubt that one of the main causes of colonial 
enterprise, especially in its earlier stages, was the desire to 
gain some share of the gold and silver 3 which Spain had 
obtained so freely. This, indeed, is a frequent inducement 
to open up and to take possession of new countries, as has 
been exemplified in our own time both in Australia and 
South Africa. Often, however, those who go out to seek 
gold find something better and more lasting in the natural 
resources of the country ; and it is upon these alone that a 
really stable colony can be founded. The dream of finding 
Eldorados passed away after a few futile attempts, and men 
began to realise that America and the Indies — -both East and 
West — offered enormous facilities for a profitable trade. The 
profits of trade were undoubtedly the real motives of nearly 
all our subsequent colonial enterprises, with the exception 

1 The use of this word seems to me almost the only fault of Prof. Seeley's 
admirable lectures. It implies a kind of growth which really never took 
place till late in the nineteenth century. 

2 See Britannia Languens (1680), p. 173. 

3 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk. IV. ch. vii. (Vol. II. p. 143, 
Clarendon Press edn.) ; and Capt. J. Smith, History of Virginia, iii. 3 
( Works, 407), mentions how this hope of gold animated the first settlers in 
Virginia. So, too, Sir Walter Raleigh hoped to find gold in Guiana, and 
Frobisher's expedition of 1577 was entirely to seek for gold. Craik, British 
Commerce, i. 246, 254. 



COMMERCE AND WAR 291 

of those which proceeded (as in the case of some of the 
North American colonies) from the desire to find a country 
where men could practise freely the varied forms of a new 
religion. Later on, when these profits were seen to be 
considerable, the home Government began to formulate a 
definite scheme of colonial policy, in the supposed interests 
of the mother country ; 1 and there seems to have been at 
one time a clearly-defined scheme in the heads of poli- 
ticians to raise up a number of agricultural dependencies 
which would exchange their useful products for the numerous 
manufactures which were now becoming so predominant at 
home. 2 This scheme approximated more nearly to the 
relations of England and her colonies — which are all new 
and hardly yet fully developed countries — in the present day. 
Such a trading connection is a natural and nearly inevitable 
state of things, and is almost sure to constitute the normal 
relationship of colony and parent nation. But in the 
eighteenth century England very nearly broke off this 
relationship by ill-judged political action, 3 while in the 
present day her newer colonies are rather foolishly attempt- 
ing to do the same without having the excuse of political 
or economic ignorance to shield them, an ignorance which it 
might have been hoped that the War of American Indepen- 
dence and other subsequent events would have helped to dispel. 
But leaving the motives for the foundation of colonies, 
we may notice their remarkable growth in the seventeenth 
century, 4 and pass on to consider the vast struggle in which 
that growth involved England. 

§ 177. Further Wars with France and Spain. 

All the wars in which England now engaged had some 
commercial or colonial object in view. People had yet to 

1 See all Adam Smith's chapter, Wealth of Nations, Bk. IV. eh. vdi.; 
also the very valuable essay on Colonies and Colony Trade in M'Culloch's 
Dictionary of Commerce, edn. 1844. 

8 M'Culloch, Dictionary of Commerce {s.v. Colonies), p. 318, edn. 1844, 
says this is untrue, at least at first. 3 See below, pp. 364-370. 

4 See the author's British Commerce and Colonies, ch. iv. This being a 
history of industry, the subject of our colonies can only be very briefly re- 
ferred to. Besides the American colonies (p. 295, note) England now had 
several of the West Indian islands and factories on the Gold Coast. 



292 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

learn that the best way to extend a nation's trade is to 
promote general peace ; but, in default of that, it seemed 
well to provoke a general war. Mistaken as England's 
policy was, it was no more so than that of her neigh- 
bours, for all believed, as many do still, in the sole market 
theory, and England was compelled to fight against other 
nations who wished to have a monopoly of trade and 
colonisation. Moreover, England was provoked into war by 
the secret " Family Compact " between the related rulers of 
France and Spain, by which Philip V. of Spain agreed to 
take away the South American trade from England, and 
give it to his nephew, Louis XV. of France. 1 The result 
was a system of annoyance to English vessels trading in the 
South Seas, culminating in the mutilation of an English 
captain, one Jenkins, 2 and war was declared openly in 
1739. This war merged into the war of the Austrian 
Succession, 3 which lasted for eight years (1740-48), a 
matter with which England was in no way directly con- 
cerned, but which afforded a good excuse to renew the 
struggle against the commercial growth of France as well 
as Spain. We did not gain much by it, except the final 
annihilation of the hopes of the Stuarts, and a small in- 
crease of British power upon the high seas, but yet it was 
undoubtedly necessary to check the power of France. 

After a few years, however, we entered upon another 
war, the Seven Years' War 4 (1756-63), in which England 
and Prussia fought side by side against the rest of Europe, 
and attacked France in particular in all parts of the world. 
The war was largely caused by the quarrels of the French 
and English colonists in America, and of the rival French 
and English companies in India. 5 We cannot here go into 
the details of it. It is sufficient to say that, after a bad be- 
ginning, we won various victories by sea and land, and at 

1 Its main object was the ruin of the maritime supremacy of Britain. 
Green, History, iv. 153. 

2 This story is sometimes declared mythical {e.g., by Seeley, Expansion, 
p. 21), but seems to rest on some foundation. 

3 Of. Green, History, iv. 155. 

4 Green, History, iv. 175-189 ; Lecky, History, ii. 443, iii. 44. 

5 Seeley, Expansion, p. 27, points out how many of these conflicts took 
place when England and France were nominally at peace. 



COMMERCE AND WAR 293 

at the close (1763) found ourselves, by the Treaty of Paris, 
in possession of Canada, Florida, and all the French posses- 
sions east of the Mississippi, except New Orleans ; and we 
had also gained the upper hand in India. England held 
now almost undisputed sway over the seas, and our trade 
grew by leaps and bounds. 

Now, the whole of this series of wars is connected to- 
gether by a necessary cause, and that is the growing com- 
mercial and industrial power of England. This growth was 
a cause of the English attempt to take a place among other 
commercial nations, such as the Dutch and Portuguese, and 
this attempt in turn necessitated an attack upon the 
monopoly of Spain and the rival power of France. The 
successful issue of these wars again caused industry and 
trade to advance more prosperously than ever, till at length, 
both politically and industrially, England rose to the front 
rank of European nations. It has also been well pointed 
out, that in the three wars between 1740 and 1783, the 
struggle as between England and France was more especially 
for the New World. In the first war the issue was fairly 
joined ; in the second France suffered a fatal fall ; in the 
third, by assistiog the American States, she took a signal 
revenge. 1 " This is the grand chapter in the history of 
Greater Britain, for it is the first great struggle in which 
the (British) Empire fights as a whole, the colonies and 
settlements outside Europe being here not merely dragged 
in the wake of the mother country, but actually taking the 
lead." 2 To the history of these colonial dependencies we 
must now devote a few words, beginning first with India. 



§ 178. The Struggle for India. 

Since the founding of Surat and the acquisition of 
Bombay, the East India Company had also founded two 
forts or stations, which have since become most important 
cities, namely, Fort St George, now Madras, and Fort 
William, now Calcutta. 3 They had become powerful, and 

1 Seeley, Expansion, p. 31. 2 lb., p. 31. 

8 Macpherson, History of European Commerce with India, p. 125. 



294 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

each of the three chief stations had a governor and a small 
army. The French, however, had also an East India 
Company, 1 whose chief station was Pondicherry, south of 
Madras ; and the two companies were by no means on 
friendly terms. When their respective nations were at war 
in 1746-48, they, too, had some sharp fighting, but it was 
only when Dupleix, 2 the French Governor of Pondicherry, 
had gained such remarkable influence in Southern India 
about 1748, that matters became serious. Dupleix was 
one of the first Europeans who deliberately involved him- 
self in native politics in order to further his country's 
interests, and he conceived the idea of the conquest of 
India. The English traders feared with justice the loss 
both of their lives and commerce, and open war broke out. 
The magnificent exertions of CLive and Lawrence, however, 
defeated the French; Dupleix was recalled in 1754, and 
quiet was for a time restored. 3 But two years afterwards 
the Seven Years' War broke out, and India was disturbed 
again. Suraj-ud-Daula, the ally of the French, took Calcutta 
and committed the Black Hole atrocity (1757), and he and 
his allies did their best to drive the English out of Bengal. 4 
This province, however, was saved by Clive at the battle 
of Plassey ; 5 Coote defeated the French at Wondiwash or 
Yandivasu (1760); and Pondicherry was captured by the 
English in 1761. 6 Finally, in 1765, the East India Com- 
pany became the collector of the revenues for Bengal, Behar, 
and Orissa, and thus the English power was acknowledged 
and consolidated. 7 Our future struggles in India were not 
with the French, but with native princes. So completely 
did the French power decline that Napoleon, when he was 
a young and unknown person, so far from dreaming of the 
conquest of India (as he did later), actually thought of 
entering the English East India Company's service in order 

1 It was organised by Colbert in 1664, but was very unsuccessful at first ; 
Malleson, French in India, pp. 27, 57. 

2 Cf. Lecky, History, ii. 455 ; cf. Seeley, Expansion, p. 30. 

3 Lecky, History, ii. 455, 456. 4 Lecky, ii. 456, 497. 
5 Lecky, History, ii. 498. 6 lb., ii. 503. 

7 lb., iii. 478. See Lecky's useful summary of the conduct of the Com- 
pany in India. 



COMMERCE AND WAR 



295 



to acquire the wealth of an Anglo-Indian nabob. 1 Never- 
theless, for a long time the English were actuated in all 
their Indian conduct and politics by fear of the French. 
" Behind every movement of the native powers we saw 
French intrigue, French gold, French ambition ; and never, 
until we were masters of the whole country, got rid of that 
feeling that the French were driving us out of it, which had 
descended from the days of Dupleix and Labourdonnais." 2 
East and west the duel with France went on, and the 
underlying cause of the duel was the evergrowing industrial 
life of England that burst forth into new colonial ventures 
beyond the seas. 

§ 179. The Conquest of Canada. 

There was, however, a great struggle for commercial 
supremacy to be waged against the French in America. It 
began in 1754. The English had now thirteen flourishing 
colonies between the Alleghany Mountains and the sea. 3 
Behind them, above them, and below them, all was claimed 



1 Jung, Lucien Bonaparte et ses Memoires, i. 74 (Seeley). 

2 Seeley, Expansion, p. 30. 

3 The following list may be useful ; and cf. Lecky, History, ii. 18 sqq. 



Colony. 


Date of 
Foundation. 


How Founded. 


I. Virginia Group — 






Virginia 


1606 


By the London Company 


Maryland 


1632 


Charter given to Lord 
Baltimore 


N. and S. Carolina 


1663 


Proprietors 


Georgia 


1733 


By General Oglethorpe 


II. New York Group — 






New York 


1664 


) 


New Jersey 


1664 


\- Taken from the Dutch 


Delaware 


1664 


J 


Pennsylvania 


1682 


Purchased by Wm. Penn 
from Charles II. N 


III. New England Group — 






New Hampshire 


1622 


^ 


Massachusetts 


1628 


(Colonised by Puritan 


Rhode Island 


1631 


f Settlers 


Connecticut 


1633 


J 



296 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

by France as French territory. It was inevitable that the 
growth of our colonies should lead to war, and such was 
actually the case. The French began by driving out English 
settlers from land west of the Alleghany Mountains ; the Eng- 
lish retorted by driving French settlers out of Nova Scotia, and 
tried to make a colony in the Ohio valley. 1 In this latter 
object they were foiled by Duquesne, the French Governor 
of Canada, who built Fort Duquesne there in 1754. Shortly 
afterwards, the next Governor, Montcalm, conceived the idea 
of linking together Forts Duquesne, Niagara, and Ticonderoga 
by lesser forts, so as to keep the English in their narrow 
strip of eastern coast-line. Then the English Government 
at home took up the matter, and sent out General Brad- 
dock with 2000 men to help the colonists. 2 Braddock 
was defeated 3 and killed (1755), but when the Seven 
Years' War broke out in the next year, Pitt sent ammuni- 
tion, men, and money to help the colonists to attack Quebec 
and Montreal. 4 The war was renewed in Canada with fresh 
vigour; Fort Duquesne was captured in 1758, Quebec in 
1759, and Montreal in 1760 ; 5 and when peace 6 was made 
at Paris in 1763, England had gained all the French pos- 
sessions in America, and her colonists were enabled to extend 
as far as they desired. We unfortunately lost them by a 
mistaken policy a few years afterwards. 

§ 180. Survey of Commercial Progress during 
these Wars. 

We may now make a brief survey of our commercial 
progress in the seventeenth century. The reign of James 
I. was noticeable for the rapid growth of the foreign trade 
which had developed from the somewhat piratical excursions 
of the Elizabethan sailors. Trading companies were formed 
in considerable numbers, and among them the Levant 
Company may be noticed, as making great profits in its 
Eastern trade. 7 The mercantile class was now growing 

1 Lecky, ii. 443. 2 lb., ii. 444. 3 lb., ii. 446. 

4 lb., ii. 494. 5 lb., ii. 495. 6 lb., iii. 46. 

7 Craik, British Commerce, ii. 19 ; cf. also Mun, Discourse of Trade from 

England to East India. 



COMMERCE AND WAR 297 

both numerous and powerful, and a proof of their advance 
in social position and influence is furnished by the new title 
of nobility, that of baronet, conferred by James I. upon 
such merchant princes as were able and willing to pay the 
needy king a good round sum for the honour. 1 It is in- 
teresting, by the way, to notice the figures of trade in his 
reign. In 1613 the exports and imports both together 
were about £4,628,586 in value, 2 and a sign of a quickly 
developing Eastern trade is also seen in the fact that James 
made attempts to check the increasing export of silver from 
the kingdom. 3 At this time English merchants traded not 
only in the East, but with most of the Mediterranean ports, 
with Portugal, Spain, France, Hamburg, and the Baltic 
coasts. 4 Ships from the north and west of Europe used in 
return to visit the Newcastle collieries, which were rapidly 
growing in value. 5 The English ships were also very active 
in the new cod fisheries of Newfoundland and the Green- 
land whale fisheries. 6 The development of English trade 
is signalised in this century by the appearance of numerous 
books and essays on commercial questions, of which the 
works of Mun, Malynes, Misselden, Roberts, Sir Josiah 
Child, Sir William Petty, Worth, and Davenant may be 
mentioned as among the most important. 7 The increase in 
the wealth of the country is shown by the rapid rebuilding 
of London after the Great Fire, 8 when the loss was estimated 
at £12,000,000 ; and Sir Josiah Child, writing in 1665, 
speaks of the great development of the commerce and trade 
of England in the previous twenty years. 9 The East India 
Company was so flourishing that in 1676 their stock was 
quoted at 245 per cent. 10 Trade with America was equally 

1 Gardiner, History, ii. 112. The sum was £1080. 

2 Craik, British Commerce, ii. 33. 

s Heavy fines were imposed on foreign merchants for doing this in 1619 ; 
Gardiner, History, iii. 323. 

4 See Lewes Roberts, The Merchants' Map of Commerce : London, 1638 ; 
passim and especially Pt. ii. p. 257. 

5 Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 140. 6 Craik, British Commerce, ii. 29. 

7 See Palgrave's new Dictionary of Pol. Economy for these. 

8 Craik, British Commerce (quoting Child), ii. 83. 

9 Child, yew Discourse on Trade, written in 1665, and published in 1668. 
10 Craik, BHtish Commerce, ii. 101. 



298 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

prosperous. New Amsterdam, now New York, was taken 
from the Dutch 1 in 1664, and in 1670 the Hudson's Bay 
Company received their charter. But the main commercial 
fact of the latter half of the seventeenth century, and of 
the eighteenth, was the development of the Eastern trade, 
and, as a consequence, of the home production of articles 
to be exchanged for Eastern goods. 2 English ships went as 
far as India, to Arabia and to Africa, and traded with the 
Spanish colonies in the New World. The cloth trade 
especially was greatly increased, 3 and imports of cloth from 
abroad were almost superseded. This improvement in 
English manufactures led to increased trade with our colonial 
possessions, especially in the West Indies. 4 It was partly, 
perhaps, this great development of English trade with 
both the Western and the Eastern markets that stimulated 
the genius of the great inventors to supply our manu- 
facturers with machinery that would enable them to meet 
the huge demands upon their powers of production, for, by 
1760, the export trade had grown to many times its value 
in the days of James I. Then, as we saw, it was only 
some £2,000,000 per annum; in 1703, nearly a hundred 
years later, it was, according to an MS. of Davenant's, 5 
£6,552,019; by 1760 it reached £14,500,000. 6 The 
markets, too, had undergone a change. We no longer 
exported so largely to Holland, 7 Portugal, and France, as 
in the seventeenth century, but instead, one-third of our 
exports went to our colonies. 8 In 1770, for example, 
America took three-fourths of the manufactures of Man- 

1 Anderson, Chron. Deduct. Commerce, ii. 479, and for the Hudson's Bay 
Co., cf. Anderson, ii. 514. 

2 Rogers, Econ. Interpretation of History, p. 288. 

3 In 1699 the woollen cloth manufacture formed between a half and a 
third of the total exports (£2,932,292 out of £6,788,166). Davenant, 
Second Report to Commissioners of Public Accounts ; Works, v. 460. 

4 Craik, British Commerce, ii. 137. 

5 Quoted in Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 56, note. Craik, British 
Commerce, ii. 155, gives £6,644,103, also from Davenant. But the figures 
are nearly the same. 

6 The exact figure (Craik, British Commerce, iii. 10) was £15,781,175, 
but of this £1,086,205 came from Scotland. 

7 Craik, British Commerce, ii. 155. 

8 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, 57- 



COMMERCE AND WAR 299 

Chester, 1 and Jamaica alone took almost as much of our 
manufactures as all our plantations together had done in 
the beginning of the century. 2 

§ 181. Commercial Events of the Seventeenth Century. 

This is not a history of Commerce, and, therefore, any 
mention of commercial facts must here be brief. 3 But the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are so marked by 
commercial progress, and are so crowded with important 
mercantile events, that we must pause to notice a few of 
the most remarkable of them. Among these we may place 
the humble origin of that marvellous system of banking, 
which is at once the basis and the apex of the modern 
mercantile fabric. Banking first seems to have assumed 
the importance of a regular business in England early in 
the seventeenth or late in the sixteenth century. It was 
carried on especially by goldsmiths/ who often advanced 
money to the sovereign upon the security of taxes or personal 
credit. A pamphlet of 1676, called The Mystery of the 
Neivfashioned Goldsmiths or Bankers Discovered, shows 
how banking and money-lending had become a regular 
business, and gives the year 1645 as about the time when 
commercial men began regularly to put their cash in the 
hands of goldsmiths. It also states that " the greatest of 
them {i.e., of the goldsmiths) were enabled to supply Crom- 
well with money in advance upon the revenues, as his 
occasions required, at great advantage to themselves." 
Similarly the famous goldsmith, George Heriot, 5 had fre- 
quently obliged James I. It is well known how the 
London goldsmiths advanced Charles II. as much as 
£1,300,000, at 8 to 10 per cent, interest, upon the 
security of the taxes; and how (in 1672) he suddenly re- 
fused to repay the principal, saying they must be content 

1 Young, Northern Tour, iii. 194. 

2 Burke, Works, i. 278. 

8 I have treated the strictly commercial facts in another volume, British 
Commerce and Colonies, from Elizabeth to Victoria. 

4 See my article on Goldsmiths' notes in Palgrave's Dictionary of Political 
Economy. 

5 Cf. the excellent note (B) to Sir Walter Scott's Fortunes of Nigel. 



300 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

with the interest, and closed the exchequer, thus causing a 
serious commercial panic. 1 

The unsatisfactory method of obtaining loans from gold- 
smiths and other private persons was partly the cause of 
William Paterson's project 2 of founding what is now known 
as the Bank of England (1694). Paterson offered to pro- 
vide the Government of William III. with £1,200,000, to 
be repaid by taxation on beer or other liquors, and by rates 
on shipping, while those who subscribed this money were 
incorporated into a regular company, which was to receive 
8 per cent, interest, and also £4000 a year for management. 3 
Thus the matter of loans was first placed upon a proper 
basis, while the Bank thus formed, and supported by 
Government credit, took at once a leading position in Eng- 
lish commerce. The loan just mentioned 4 was the begin- 
ning of a regular National Debt, which may be briefly 
defined as the system of contracting loans upon the security 
of the supplies or upon Government credit, and of paying 
them off gradually in succeeding generations. 5 

The Restoration of the Currency was another event of 
historical importance. It was due to Montague, the Chan- 
cellor of the Exchequer. Although, as we saw, Elizabeth 
had reformed the standard of the coinage, yet, up to the 
time of Charles II., silver money was made by simply 
cutting the metal with shears, and shaping and stamping it 
with a hammer. It was thus quite easy to clip or shear 
the coins again without being detected, and then pass them 
off to an unsuspecting person for their full amount. So 
the coins became smaller and smaller, and people often 
found, on presenting them at a bank or elsewhere, that they 
were only worth half their nominal value. At first, under 

1 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 223. 

2 Cf. Paterson's own Account of Transactions in relation to the Bank of 
England, 1695 ; and Craik, British Commerce, ii. 124 ; also (for Paterson) 
Macaulay, History, ch. xxiv. 

3 Craik, u. s., ii. 125; Anderson, Chron. Comm., ii. 604; also Rogers, 
First Nine Years of the Bank of England, should be referred to. 

4 Strictly speaking, the money stolen by Charles II. from the goldsmiths 
was the first debt, but it was not included till later. Cunningham, Growth 
of Industry, ii. 223. 

6 Cf. Cunningham, u. s., ii. 403; Rogers, Econ. Inter p., 449. 



COMMERCE AND WAR 301 

Charles II., it was thought sufficient to issue new coins with 
a ribbed or " milled " edge, but the only result of this was 
that the good coin was melted or exported, and (as is always 
the case) the inferior money remained at home. It was 
then seen, by Montague and Sir Isaac Newton (the Master 
of the Mint), that the only way was to call in the old coin- 
age, and issue an entirely new and true milled currency. 
The expenses of this recoinage, which cost some two and a 
half millions, were defrayed by a tax on window-panes. 1 

§ 182. Other Important Commercial Events. 

Among the important commercial events of this period, 
one ought certainly to include the Darien Scheme and the 
Union of England and Scotland, although these belong 
more fitly to a history of Commerce than of Industry. 
Tbe Darien Scheme was a project originated by William 
Paterson, the founder of the Bank of England, who pro- 
posed to colonise the Isthmus of Darien, and use it as " the 
key of the Indies and door of the world " for commerce. 2 
English capitalists, however, would not support his scheme, 
and it was denounced by the English Parliament. Never- 
theless, a company was formed in Scotland, called " The 
Scottish African and Indian Company," a charter was given 
it by the Scotch Parliament in 1695, and a capital of 
£900,000 was ultimately raised, £400,000 coming from 
Scotland, then a very poor country, and the rest from 
English and Dutch merchants. The hostility of the East 
India Company, the Levant Company, and of the Dutch in 
general, however, never ceased, and it was owing to their 
influence that, when the ill-fated colon)' at last set out for 
Darien in July 1698, the settlers were left quite unaided 
against the attacks of the Spaniards, who claimed the 
monopoly of South American trade. In fact, Spanish 
attacks and the climate, so utterly unsuited for European 
colonists, sealed the fate of the expedition, and few who 
went out ever returned. This failure had the most serious 

1 Rogers, Econ. Interp., p. 200 ; Craik, British Commerce, ii. 127. 

2 For an account of this Company see Burton's History of Scotland, ch. 
viii., and Macaulay's History of England, ch. xxiv, 



302 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

effect in impoverishing the Scotch, who could then ill afford 
the loss, but there is little doubt that it greatly helped to 
bring about the subsequent Act of Union 1 between England 
and Scotland, in which William Paterson was largely con- 
cerned (1707). The Union proved of considerable benefit 
to Scotland, as by it trade between the two countries be- 
came free, English ports and colonies were thrown open to 
the Scotch, and Scotland found a large market for woollen 
and linen goods and cattle in England. 

The woollen cloth trade had now assumed such proportions 
as to make it worth while to attempt to help it forward still 
more by a commercial treaty. This treaty is important mainly 
because at the time it was regarded as a monument of economic 
wisdom. 2 Th e date of the Meth uen Treaty is 1 7 3, and it was 
arranged by John Methuen between England and Portugal. 
It was agreed that British woollen goods should be admitted 
into Portugal and her colonies, provided that at all times 
Portuguese wines were admitted into England at two-thirds 
of the duty (whatever it might be) levied on French wines. 
The result was a considerable increase of trade with Portugal, 
but an even greater decrease of trade with France, 3 while the 
wine-drinking of our upper classes took, a very different 
direction, for port, which had hitherto been almost unknown 
in England, became the typical drink of the English gentle- 
man, and more port was sent to the United Kingdom than 
to all the rest of Europe together. 4 It was not till the 
time of the commercial treaty of 1860 with France that 
the heavy duties on light French wines were reduced, and 
with them the duties on French manufactures. 5 Till then, 
as Gladstone said in his speech on the subject in 1862, 
" it was almost thought a matter of duty to regard French- 
men as traditional enemies," not only in politics, but in com- 
merce. This French treaty was only one among the many 
and great services of Cobden to the commerce of his country. 6 

1 Craik, British Commerce, ii. 183 ; Cunningham, Growth of Industry, 
ii. 411. 

2 Craik, British Commerce, ii. 165. 3 lb., ii. 166. 

4 Bourne, Romance of Trade, 135. 

5 The Methuen Treaty itself lasted till 1831. Craik, u. s., ii. 165, 

6 Morley, Life of Cobden, ch, xxvii, 



COMMERCE AND WAR 303 

It is noticeable that in this period commerce takes an 
entirely modern tone. We have seen this in the case of 
banking, of national finance, and of commercial policy. We 
now notice it also in the growth of speculation ; for the 
eighteenth century is distinguished by its mania for com- 
mercial gambling. It is the era in which the modern 
company promoter makes his first appearance. Many 
companies were started, far too numerous to mention here, 
their promotion being due partly no doubt to the fact 
that those who had hoarded their money during the 
previous wars were, in the early part of the eighteenth 
century, anxious to make profitable use of it. Of these 
new companies the most famous was the South Sea Com- 
pany, formed in 1 7 1 1 to trade with South America, but after- 
wards partaking more of the nature of a financial company. 
The directors anticipated enormous profits, and offered to 
advance the Government £7,500,000 to pay off part of the 
National Debt. 1 Every one knows the story of their col- 
lapse (1721), and the ruin it brought upon thousands of 
worthy but credulous shareholders. But though the most 
famous, it was by no means the only, or even the first, pro- 
ject of its kind ;, 2 for this was a time when all the accumu- 
lated capital of the country seemed to run riot in hopes of 
gaining profits. Hundreds of smaller companies were 
started every day, and an unhealthy excitement prevailed. 3 
One company, with a capital of £3,000,000, was started 
" for insuring to all masters and mistresses the losses they 
may sustain by servants " ; another " for making salt-water 
fresh " ; a third for " planting mulberry trees and breeding 
silk-worms in Chelsea Park." One in particular was de- 
signed for importing " a number of large jackasses from Spain 
in order to propagate a larger kind of mule in England/' 
as if, remarks a later writer with some severity, there were 
not already jackasses enough in London alone. 4 

All this mania for investing capital, however, shows how 

1 Cf. Craik, British Commerce, ii. 190, and Anderson, Chron. Commerce, 
ii. 614. 

2 Cf. Defoe's Essay on Projects (1697), especially pp. 11 to 13, 

3 Cf. Craik and Anderson, u. s. 

4 Jb,, also Bourne, Romance of Trade, 3J6, 



304 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

prosperous England had now become, and how great a quantity 
of wealth had been accumulated, partly by trade, but also 
by the growth of manufactures, and by improvements in 
agriculture. Englishmen now felt strong enough to begin 
another struggle for the monopoly of trade, 1 with the result 
that fresh wars were undertaken, and the country was 
heavily burdened with debt. But the wars were, on the 
whole, a success, though the wish for a monopoly was a 
mistake. We see, in fact, from this brief review, that the 
prosperity and development of modern English commerce, 
as we know it, had now begun. It was due, of course, not 
to the great wars we had waged for the right of a sole 
market, but to the fact that we were able to supply the 
markets of the world with manufactured goods which no 
other country could then produce. 2 How we were able to 
do so will shortly be seen, when we come to speak of the 
Industrial Revolution of the last half of the eighteenth 
century. Meanwhile, we will glance at the state of our 
manufacturing industries in the period before this great 
change. 

1 On the " sole market " theory, see Rogers, Econ. Interp., 323. 

2 This was due very largely to the political troubles of other countries. 
Rogers, Econ. Interpretation, p. 289 ; and below, p. 358. 



CHAPTER XIX 



MANUFACTUKES AND MINING 



§ 183. Circumstances Favourable to English 
Manufactures. 

It has been frequently remarked in previous chapters that 
Flanders was the great manufactory of Europe throughout 
the Middle Ages, and up to the sixteenth century. Her 
competition would in any case have been sufficient to check 
much export of manufactured goods from England, though 
we had by the sixteenth century got past the time when 
most of our imports of clothing came from Flanders. But, 
at the end of the sixteenth century, Flemish competition 
was practically annihilated, owing to the ravages made in 
the Low Countries by the Spanish persecutions and occupa- 
tion. 1 But England did not benefit merely by the cessation 
of Flemish competition : she received at the same time 
hundreds of Flemish immigrants, 2 who greatly improved 
our home manufactures, and thus our prosperity was doubly 
assisted. The result is seen in the fact that our export of 
wool diminished, while the export of cloth increased, till at 
the close of the seventeenth century woollen goods formed 
two-thirds of our total exports. 3 

§ 184. Wool Trade. Home Manufactures. Dyeing. 

In the reign of James I. the wool trade is even said to have 
declined, 4 and certainly we know that little wool can have 
been exported, for nearly all that produced in England was 
used for home manufacture. On the other hand, however, 
the same fact shows that the manufacturing industry was 

1 Above, p. 230. 2 Above, pp. 221, 230. 

3 Davenant, Of Gain in Trade (1699), p. 47. 

4 Craik, British Commerce, ii. 34, who thinks the decline partly due to 
the effects of the monopoly granted to Cockayne. 

TJ 3 ° 5 



306 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

rising in importance, for it required all the home-grown 
wool that could be got; and, in 1648, and again in 1660, 
the export of British wool was for this reason forbidden, 1 
and remained so till 1825. The woollen cloth trade was 
very largely in the hands of the Merchant Adventurers, 2 
against whose methods serious complaints were sometimes 
made, 3 but the manufacturing industry flourished steadily, 
and a considerable part of the population was now engaged 
in it. The usefulness of our climate, too, for this particular 
manufacture had been discovered, and was now recognised, 4 
while the manufacturing industry was likewise aided by 
the impetus given to dyeing by the exertions of Sir Walter 
Raleigh. Previously to James I.'s reign most English goods 
had to be sent to the Netherlands to be dyed, 5 as was ex- 
plained above; but Raleigh 6 called attention to this fact, and 
proposed to grant a monopoly for the art of dyeing and dress- 
ing. It was by his advice that the export of English white 
goods was 7 prohibited (1608), a proceeding which caused 
considerable discussion and controversy. 8 At the same time 
a monopoly was granted to Sir William Cockayne, giving 
him the exclusive right of dyeing and dressing all woollen 
cloths. 9 But the Dutch and German cities immediately 
retaliated by prohibiting the import of any dyed cloths 
from England, and great confusion arose. " Cockayne was 
disabled from selling his cloth anywhere but at home, 
beside that his cloths were worse done, and yet were dearer, 
than those finished in Holland. There was a very great 
clamour, therefore, raised against this new project by the 
weavers now employed, so that the king was obliged to 

1 Scobell, Acts, i. 138, and the 12 Charles II., c. 32. 

2 Cf. Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 120. 

3 Craik, British Commerce, ii. 35. 

4 Bishop Burnet remarked this to Davenant ; Davenant, WorJcs, ii. 235. 

5 Gardiner, History, ii. 386. 

6 Observations concerning the Trade and Commerce of England with the 
Dutch and other Foreign Nations ; cf. Craik, British Commerce, ii. 9-12 ; 
Smith, Memoirs of Wool, ch. xxx. , xxxi. 

7 Craik, British Commerce, ii. 33. 

8 Smith, Memoirs of Wool, ch. xxxi.-xxxvi. 

9 Gardiner, History, ii. 386, 387 ; Smith, Memoirs of Wool, ch. xxxi. and 
notes. It seems doubtful whether Cockayne's patent was granted in 
1608-9 or 1616 ; see Smith, u. s. 



MANUFACTURES AND MINING 30; 

permit the exportation of a limited quantity of white cloths ; 
and a few years after (1615) for quieting the people he 
found himself under the necessity of annulling Cockayne's 
patent." 1 

Thus the monopoly failed in its object, as such attempts 
usually do, but still it is worth noticing as an instance of 
what was then the universal policy of subjecting industry 
to various regulations, either for the benefit of those con- 
cerned in the industry itself, or because it was thought 
that benefit might accrue to the State in general. 2 The 
regulation of industry was, in fact, regarded as quite right 
and necessary, either for purely political purposes, 3 or to 
maintain the quality of manufactures ; and though in 
modern times the tendency has rather been to get rid of 
State regulation altogether, there are still a fair number of 
cases where industry is more or less supervised by the State 
for the good of the community. 4 

§ 185. Other Influences Favourable to England. The 
Huguenot Immigration. 

But other influences were at work in the seventeenth 
century in favour of our home industries. It becomes more 
and more apparent that our insular position was specially 
suitable for the development of manufactures as soon as 
they made a fair start. Except for the Parliamentary War, 
which did not disturb the industry of the country very 
much — for there is no sign of undue exaltation of prices, or 
anything else that points to commercial distress 5 — England 
was free from the terrible conflicts that desolated half 
Europe in the Thirty Years' War. Our own Civil War 
was conducted with hardly any of the bloodshed, plunder, 
and rapine that make war so disastrous. But the Thirty 
Years' War (1619-1648) did not cease till the utter ex- 
haustion of the combatants made peace inevitable, and till 
every leader who had taken part in the beginning of the 

1 Anderson, Chron. Deduct. Commerce, ii. 232. 

2 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 157. 

3 E.g., the export of bullion was prohibited for political reasons. 

4 The Factory Acts of the nineteenth century are an instance of this. 

5 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 432, says agriculture even progressed. 



308 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

struggle was in his grave. Germany was effectually ruined, 1 
and with Germany and Flanders laid low, England had 
little to fear from foreign competition. And just at this 
moment the folly of our neighbour, the French King Louis 
XIV., induced him to deprive his nation of most of its 
skilled workmen by the Eevocation of the Edict of Nantes. 
His loss was our gain. The Edict in question, passed 
nearly a century previously, had insured freedom of worship 
to the French Huguenots, who comprised in their ranks the 
dite of the industrial population. Louis XIV. 2 set to work 
to exterminate the Protestant religion in France, and be- 
gan by revoking this Edict (1685). Once more England 
profited by her Protestantism, and, owing to the religious 
opinions of her people, received a fresh accession of in- 
dustrial strength. Some thousands of skilled Huguenot 
artisans and manufacturers came over and settled in this 
land. 3 They greatly improved the silk, glass, and paper 
trades, 4 and exercised considerable influence in the develop- 
ment of domestic manufactures generally. It is said that 
the immigrants numbered 50,000 souls, with a capital of 
some £3,000,000. 5 Every one knows how they introduced 
the silk industry into this country, and how Spitalfields 
long remained a colony of Huguenot silk-weavers. 6 Their 
descendants are to be found in every part of England. 

§ 186. Distribution of the Cloth Trade. 

fS From this time forward the cloth trade, in especial, took 
its place among the chief industries of the country, largely 
owing to the fresh spirit infused into it, first by Flemish, and 
afterwards by French weavers. We have already seen where 
it chiefly flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- 
turies, and now it became more and more widely distributed. 7 

1 Rogers, Econ. Interpretation of History, 287. 

2 See Voltaire, Steele de Louis XIV., ch. xxxii. 

3 Cf. Anderson, Chron. Deduct. Commerce, ii. 568. 

4 lb., ii. 569. 5 lb., ii. 569. 

6 Voltaire, Steele de Louis XIV., ch. xxxii. ; Lecky, History of the 
Eighteenth Century, i. 191. 

7 For the following details, cf. Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 95, and the Act 
4 and 5 James I. , c. 2. 



MANUFACTURES AND MINING 309 

The county of Kent, and the towns of York and Read- 
ing, made one kind of cloth of a heavy texture, the 
piece being thirty or thirty-four yards long by six and 
one-half broad, and weighing 66 lbs. to the piece. 
Worcester, Hereford, and Coventry made a lighter kind of 
fabric, while throughout the eastern counties of Norfolk, 
Suffolk, and Essex were made cloths of various kinds — 
plunkets, azures, blues, long cloth, bay, say, and serges ; 
Suffolk, in particular, made a " fine, short, white cloth." 
Wiltshire and Somerset made plunkets and handy warps ; 
Yorkshire, short cloths. Eroad-listed whites and reds, and 
fine cloths, also came from Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, and 
Oxfordshire ; and Somerset was famous in the eastern part 
for narrow-listed whites and reds, and in the west for 
" dunsters." Devonshire made kerseys and grays, as also 
did Yorkshire and Lancashire. The Midlands furnished 
" Penistone " cloths and " Forest whites " ; while West- 
moreland was the seat of the manufacture of the famous 
" Kendal green" cloths, as also of " Carpmael " and " Cog- 
ware " fabrics. 1 It will be seen that the manufacture was 
exceedingly extensive, and that special fabrics derived their 
names from the chief centre where they were made. It 
may be mentioned here, too, that the value of wool shorn 
in England at the end of the seventeenth century was 
£2,000,000, from about 12,000,000 sheep (according to 
Davenant 2 ) ; and the cloth manufactured from it was 
valued at about £8,000,000. Nearly half a century 
later (1741) the number of sheep was reckoned 3 at 
17,000,000, the value of wool shorn at £3,000,000, 
and of wool manufactured at £8,000,000, showing that 
progress in invention had not done much to enhance the 
value of the manufactured article. But in 1774, when 
the Industrial Revolution may be said to have fairly begun, 
the value of manufactured wool was £13,000,000, the 
value of raw wool (£4,500,000) being smaller in pro- 
portion. 4 

1 Cf. Kogers, Hist. Agric, v. 95, and the Act 4 and 5 James I., c. 2. 

2 Davenant, Discourse on the East India Trade ; Works, ii. 146. 

3 Burnley, Wool and Woolcombing, p. 79. 4 lb. 



310 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

§ 187. Coal Mines. 

Turning now from textile manufactures to mining and 
working in metals, we find that in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries England was just upon the eve of 
the most important changes in these industries — changes 
which, in many places, have entirely transformed the face 
of the country, and have equally transformed the conditions 
of industry, and with them the social life of the working 
classes. It is no exaggeration to say that in its effects, both 
for good and evil, hardly any other historical event has been 
of so much importance as the modern improvements in coal- 
mining. But it cannot be too clearly understood that none 
of our mining and mineral industries attained any propor- 
tions worth speaking of till what is known as the Industrial 
Revolution. Englishmen seem to have had hardly any idea 
of the vast wealth of coal and iron that has placed them in 
the forefront of Europe as a manufacturing nation. Never- 
theless we may just glance at the imperfect methods which 
our forefathers used up till the eighteenth century. Coal- 
mining had been carried on fairly extensively by the 
Romans, as, for instance, the discovery of coal cinders at 
Aston 1 and other places testifies. Then, like all our in- 
dustries, it was almost entirely given up, and it was due 
to the Norman Conquest that coal-mining was revived. 
That it was practised to some extent in the North is seen 
from an entry in the Boldean Book (a kind of Domesday 
of the county of Durham, composed in 1183), in which a 
smith is allowed twelve acres of land for making the iron- 
work of the carts, and has to provide his own coal. 2 But 
collieries were not opened at Newcastle till the thirteenth 
century, 3 in the year 1238. In the next year we find 
notice of the first public recognition of coal as an article 
of commerce, and from a charter of Henry III. to the 
freemen of Newcastle, we may date the foundation of the 
coal trade. 4 In 1273 this had become sufficiently extensive 
for the use of coal to be forbidden in London, as there was 

1 Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 174. 

2 Yeats, Technical History of Commerce, p. 171. 

3 lb., p. 172. 4 lb. 



MANUFACTURES AND MINING 311 

a prejudice against it and in favour of wood as fuel. 1 In 
the fourteenth century, again, the monks of Tynemouth 
Priory engaged in mining speculation, and (1380) leased 
a colliery 2 for £5. In the fifteenth century trade was 
sufficiently important to form a source of revenue, for a tax 
of twopence per chaldron was placed upon sea-borne coal, 
and in 1421 an Act had to be passed to enforce this tax. 3 
In fact, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries coal-mining, 
although in a rather primitive fashion, became general in 
Great Britain. 

§ 188. Development of Coal Trade: Seventeenth and 
Eighteenth Centuries. 

By the seventeenth century it had also become impor- 
tant — important enough for the needy Stuart monarch 
Charles I. to see in it a chance of revenue, k This king 
gave to Sir Thomas Tempest and his partners the monopoly 
of the sale of Newcastle coal for twenty-one years, 4 be- 
ginning in 1637, and next year he allowed a syndicate to 
be incorporated which was to buy up all the coal from New- 
castle, Sunderland, and Berwick, and sell it in London for 
"not more than 17s. a ton in summer, and 19s. in winter" 
— an extravagant price for those times. The king got 
a shilling a ton out of this ingenious scheme, 5 until 
the Long Parliament finally put a stop to this outrageous 
monopoly .V Yet the coal trade still formed a favourite 
source of revenue, and the charge of re-erecting public 
buildings was defrayed by an additional custom on coals. 6 
It was said that early in the seventeenth century the New- 
castle trade alone employed four hundred vessels. 7 

But although the coal trade was fairly extensive for that 
period, it was utterly insignificant compared with its present 
dimensions, and that for a very good reason. There was no 

1 Yeats, Technical History of Commerce, p. 172. Sea-coal is found to 
have been brought as far south as Dover as early as 1279 ; cf. Rogers, 
Hist. Agric, i. 422, and ii. 394-397. 

2 Yeats, Technical History, p. 172. 3 Cf Act 9 Henry V., c. 10. 
4 Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 154. 5 lb. 

6 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 175. 

7 Craikj British Commerce, ii. 32, 



312 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

means of pumping water out of the mines, except by the 
old-fashioned air-pump, which was, of course, utterly inade- 
quate. Nor was a suitable invention discovered till the 
very end of the seventeenth century, when Thomas Savery 
in 1698, invented a kind of pump, worked by the con- 
densation of steam. 1 This rather clumsy invention, how- 
ever, was soon superseded in 1705 by Newcomen's steam 
pump. 2 But it was not till after the commencement of the 
Industrial Revolution that steam power was scientifically 
applied to coal-mines by the inventions of Watt and Boulton 
(1765 and 1774), which we shall notice in their proper 
place. 3 Up to that time, also, it was difficult to transport 
coal into inland districts by road, Newcastle coal being 
carried to London in ships, and then carried up inland 
rivers in barges. But these barges could not go high up 
many rivers at that time, and canals were not yet made. 
It was difficult, for instance, to get coal to Oxford, for it 
had first to come to London, then part of the way up the 
Thames, which was not then navigable so far as Oxford, 
and then by road. But at Cambridge it was easily pro- 
curable, for barges could come right up to the town from 
eastern ports. Hence it was much cheaper at Cambridge 
than at Oxford. 4 

§ 189. The Iron Trade. 
As it had been with coal, so with iron. Only very small 
quantities of it were mined in the Middle Ages ; it was 
smelted only by wood, 5 as a rule, and was manufactured 
in a very rude way. We saw that at the great fairs foreign 
iron, chiefly from the Biscay coast, was much in demand, as 
our own supply was utterly insufficient. 6 It was naturally 
not until we learnt to mine and use our coal properly that 
we learnt also how to mine and manufacture our iron. 
Before learning this, English workmen used wood as fuel, 

1 Smiles, Lives of the Engineers {Boulton and Watt), ch. iii. A diagram 
of Savery Y engine is on p. 49. 

2 lb., chs. iii. and iv., and diagrams, pp. 61 and 73. 

3 Below, p. 352. 

4 Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 757, 774, 776 ; vi. 560. 

5 Cf. the 35 Henry VIII. , c. 17 ; and Smiles, Industrial Biography, ch. ii, 

6 Above, p. 143. 




MANUFACTURES AND MINING 313 

and it is to this cause that we owe the destruction of most 
of the forests which, at the time of Domesday, occupied so 
large an area. The extinction of the great forest of the 
Sussex Wealden is an example of this. 1 " The waste and 
destruction of the woods in the counties of Warwick, 
Stafford, Hereford, Monmouth, Gloucester, and Salop by 
these iron- works is not to be imagined," a speaker said in 
Parliament as late as the beginning of the eighteenth 
century ; 2 and as wood was used as house-fuel also, it will 
readily be understood what a vast destruction of timber 
took place. As early as 1581 the erection of iron- works 
within certain distances from London and the Thames 
had been prohibited " for the preservation of the woods." 3 

But early in the seventeenth century Dud Dudley, son 
of Lord Dudley, began to make use of sea and pit coal for 
smelting iron, and obtained (1619) a monopoly "of the 
mystery and art of smelting iron ore, and of making the 
same into cast works or bars, in furnaces, with bellows." 4 
Dudley sold this cast iron at £12 a ton, and made a good 
profit out of it, but at last his works were destroyed by an 
ignorant mob. 5 He actually produced seven tons a week, 
which was considered a large supply, and shows the com- 
parative insignificance of the industry ' then. However, it 
was only comparatively insignificant, for before the close of 
the century it was calculated that 180,000 tons of ore were 
produced in England yearly ; and in the eighteenth century 
(1719) iron came third in the list of English manufactures, 
and the trade gave employment to 200,000 people. 6 There 
was, however, still great waste of wood, since a great many 
iron-masters did not use coal, and therefore the export and 
even the manufacture of iron was discouraged by legislation 
to such an extent, that, by 1740, the output had been 
reduced to 17,350 tons per annum, barely a tenth of the 

1 Cf. Rogers, Econ. Interpretation, p. 287 ; and below, p. 314. 

2 Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 177. 

3 M'Culloch, Commercial Dictionary (ed. 1844) ; s.v. Iron, p. 753. 

4 Cf. his book Hetallum Martis, or Iron made with pit coale, sea coale, 
tt-c. (1665) ; and M'Culloch, Commercial Diet. (1844), s.v. Iron ; also 
Smiles, Industrial Biography, ch. iii. 

5 lb. ; also Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 176. 

6 Romance of Trade, p. 177, 



314 



INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 



previous amount quoted. 1 The waste of timber was most 
noticeable in the Sussex Wealden, the forests of which owe 
their destruction almost entirely to the iron and glass 
manufactures. 2 

But about this time another inventor, Abraham Darby, 
of the famous Coalbrookdale Ironworks, 3 discovered the 
secret of the large blast-furnace in which both pit-coal and 
charcoal were used. He began his experiments as early 
as 1730, but did not do much for some twenty years. 
In 1756, however, his works were " at the top pinnacle of 
prosperity ; twenty and twenty-two tons per week sold off as 
fast as made, and profit enough." 4 

After Darby came Smeaton, and other inventors, and the 
Industrial Eevolution spread to the iron trade. We shall 
see it in operation in our next period. 5 



§ 190. Pottery. 

As with all other manufactures, so, too, the development 
of pottery was reserved for the Renaissance of industry in 
the eighteenth century. Of course pottery of a kind had 
always been made in England, especially where the useful 
soil of Staffordshire formed a favourable ground for the 
exercise of this art. 6 But the pottery hitherto manufac- 
tured had been rude and coarse, and its manufacture was 
a strictly domestic and not very widespread industry. 7 We 
owe its improvement, as in so many other cases, largely to 
the efforts of the Dutch and Huguenot 8 immigrants of the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the Dutch had 
been great among the potters of Europe, as the renown of 
Delft-ware still testifies, while France had the honour of 
being the land of Palissy. The factories at Burslem, how- 

1 Romance of Trade, p. 178, and M'Culloch, Commercial Diet., s.v. Iron. 

2 Norden, in Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 44. 

3 Smiles, Industrial Biography, ch. v. p. 80. 

4 Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 179. 5 Below, p. 341, 352. 

6 Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 169. 

7 There were, however, potteries elsewhere than in Staffs., as e.g. in 
Essex; Pennant (1801), Journey from London to the Isle of Wight, i. 53; 
and Lowestoft ware is well known to connoisseurs. 

8 Anderson, Chron. Commerce, ii. 569. 



MANUFACTURES AND MINING 315 

ever, owed their origin to the industry of two Germans from 
Nuremberg, called Elers, from whom an Englishman, 
Astbury, learnt the secret of producing the red unglazed 
Japanese ware, and the black Egyptian ware. 1 Burslem, 
too, was the birthplace of Josiah Wedgwood, 2 born 1730, 
who first began business in 1752 as manager for a master- 
potter, but started in business on his own account in 1759, 
the eve of the Industrial Revolution. His efforts and 
experiments were magnificent and untiring, and they can 
be read at leisure in various biographical works. It is 
sufficient here to say that Wedgwood was the man who 
first made the art of pottery a science, and before his death, 
in 1795, he had brought this manufacture to such a pitch 
of excellence that few improvements have been left for his 
successors to make, and it rose to be one of the chief 
industries of the country. 3 

§ 191. Other Mining Industries. 

There remain one or two industries that require a 
passing mention, but which were not in the eighteenth 
century of much importance. As to the metals, the 
foreign trade in tin and lead has been already mentioned. 
In the reign of John the tin-mines of Cornwall were 
farmed by the Jews, 4 and the tin and lead trade must have 
attained considerable proportions in the fourteenth century, 
for the Black Prince paid his own expenses in the French 
wars by the produce of his mines of those metals in 
Devonshire. 5 Copper, also, was mined in the northern 
counties, and in a statute of 15 Edward III. (1343) we 
find grants of mines given at Skeldane, in Northumber- 
land ; at Alston Moor, in Cumberland ; and at Richmond, 
in Yorkshire ; a royalty of one-eighth going to the king, 
and one-ninth to the lord of the manor. 6 Keswick was at 
that time a centre of this industry ; but the art of the 
coppersmith was developed chiefly in Germany. 7 The mines 
were also very primitive, the approaches being made, not 

1 Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 171 ; Smiles, Self Help, p. 88. 

2 Smiles, Self Help, pp. 88-93. 3 lb., p. 92. 

4 Yeats, Technical History of Commerce, p. 172. 5 lb., p. 173. 

6 lb., p. 173. 7 lb., p. 185. 



316 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

by shafts, but by adits in the side of a convenient hill. 
Another mineral, which is very abundant in England, 
especially in Worcestershire and Cheshire, was at this 
period hardly utilised. Salt was a necessary of life to the 
English householder, for he had to salt his meat for the 
winter ; but he did not know how to mine it himself, and 
either got it imported from south-west France, or contented 
himself with the inferior article evaporated on the sea- 
coast, until the end of the seventeenth century. 1 

It has been already mentioned that brick-making was a 
lost art from the fifth to the fifteenth century. The first 
purchase to be recorded was at Cambridge, in 1449 ; but 
before the end of the fifteenth century it became a common 
building material in the eastern counties, and in the six- 
teenth century was generally used in London and in the 
counties along the lower course of the Thames. 2 

§ 192. The Close of the Period of Manual Industries. 

We have now reached a turning-point in English indus- 
trial history, and are about to study a period that is in 
every way a violent contrast to the centuries which pre- 
ceded it. We have come to the time when machinery 
begins to displace unaided manual labour. Hitherto all our 
manufactures, our mining, and, of course, our agriculture, 
had been performed by the literal labour of men's hands, 
helped but slightly by a few simple inventions. Industry, 
too, was not organised upon a vast capitalistic basis, though 
of course capitalists existed ; but it would be more correct 
to say that hitherto industry had been chiefly carried on by 
numbers of smaller capitalists who were also manual work- 
men, even when they employed other workmen under them. 3 
Only in agriculture had the capitalist class become very far 
removed from the labourers. 4 There was certainly no such 
violent contrast as now exists between a mill-owner and a 
mill-hand in the realm of manufacturing industry, 5 though, 

1 Rogers, Econ. Interpretation, p. 277. 2 lb. , p. 279. 

8 Gf. Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, pp. 72, 53. 

4 Above, pp. 157, 184, 212, 216, 271. Toynbee (p. 71) is wrong in say- 
ing "the capitalist farmers were not yet in existence," 

5 Toynbee, Indust. Rev., pp. 71, 53. 



MANUFACTURES AND MINING 317 

of course, this contrast existed between the rich landowner, 
who received rents, and the poor agricultural labourer, whose 
labour helped to pay them. But, speaking of industry 
generally, it may be said that the absence of machinery 
kept employers and workmen more upon a common level ; 
and as large factories, of course, did not exist, industry was 
carried on chiefly in the workmen's homes, while the work- 
man was not merely a unit among hundreds of unknown 
" hands " in a mill, but a person not hopelessly removed in 
social rank from his employer, who was well acquainted 
with him, and, like him, worked with his own hands. 

But now this old order of things passes away, and a 
new order appears, ushered in by the whirr and rattle of 
machinery and the mighty hiss of steam. A complete 
transformation takes place, and the life of England stirs 
anew in the great Industrial Revolution. 



PERIOD V 



THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND MODEEN 
ENGLAND 



322 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

Revolution ; namely, the foundation of the Bank of Eng- 
land (1694), the new and extended Charter granted to the 
East India Company in 1693, the beginning of the National 
Debt in the same year, and the Restoration of the Currency 
in 1696. The commercial and industrial section of the 
community was becoming more and more prominent, and 
the great Whig families who occupied themselves with 
endeavouring to rule England in the eighteenth century 
relied for their support upon the middle and commercial 
classes. 1 The old reverence, however, for the position of a 
landowner had not yet died out, and the men who had 
gained their wealth by commerce strove for a higher social 
position by buying land in large quantities. 2 The time had 
not yet come when a merchant was on equal terms with a 
landowner. 

In fact, there has always been an extraordinary senti- 
mentalism as regards land among all classes of the English 
people ; and for certain reasons, which, though not entirely 
baseless, are still somewhat inadequate, a man who has 
merely inherited a large amount of land (even if he has 
never attempted to cultivate it) is regarded as superior to 
one who has amassed a fortune in the industrial or com- 
mercial world. And this feeling was stronger in the eigh- 
teenth century than it is at the present time, though it is 
-certainly even now by no means extinct. Hence com- 
mercial magnates then, as now, or even more than now, 
bought land, hoping to buy with it social prestige. The 
James Lowther who was created Earl of Lonsdale in 1784 
was the descendant of a merchant engaged in the Levant, 
trade ; 3 and the first Earl of Tilney was the son of that 
eminent man of business, Sir Josiah Child. 4 The daughters 
of merchant princes were even allowed to marry — and 
maintain — the scions of a needy aristocracy. 5 

The beginning of this new order of things can be dated 
with some accuracy by a remark of Sir W. Temple's : " I 

1 Lecky, History, i. 187. 

2 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 62. 3 lb. , p. 63. 

4 Defoe, Complete Tradesman (ed. 1839, Chambers), p. 74. 

5 Thus, Child's daughter married the Marquis of Worcester ; cf. Toynbee, 
Ind. Rev. , p. 63. 



THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION 323 

think I remember," he wrote in the last quarter of the 
seventeenth century, 1 " the first noble families that married 
into the city for downright money, and thereby introduced 
by degrees this public grievance, which has since ruined so 
many estates by the necessity of giving good portions to 
daughters." Defoe actually discovered the amazing and 
revolutionary fact that a man engaged in commerce might 
be a gentleman, though, no doubt, this bold supposition of 
his was at first looked upon with incredulity. He says : 
" Trade is so far from being inconsistent with a gentleman 
that in England trade makes a gentleman ; for, after a 
generation or two, the tradesman's children come to be as 
good gentlemen, statesmen, parliament men, judges, bishops, 
and noblemen, as those of the highest birth and the most 
ancient families." 2 Dean Swift remarked, "that the power 
which used to follow land had gone over to money." 3 Dr 
Johnson announced oracularly that " an English merchant 
was a new species of gentleman." 4 This influx of the 
merchants into the upper classes was not, however, an 
entirely new thing, though no doubt it became more notice- 
able at this time ; for Harrison, the well-known describer 
of Elizabethan England, had long before remarked that, 
though " citizens and burgesses have next place to gentle- 
men," yet, " they often change estate with gentlemen, as 
gentlemen do with them, by a mutual conversion of one 
into the other." 5 

Now, the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century 
went still further than the political revolution of the seven- 
teenth to gain social and political influence for the commer- 
cial classes. It succeeded in destroying the feudal but foolish 
idea that the landowners alone were to be looked upon as 
the leaders of the nation. It gave the capitalists and 
manufacturers a new accession of power, by enormously in- 
creasing their wealth. Moreover, it helped to undermine 
the landed interest by making the manufactures of England 

1 Temple's Miscellanies, quoted in Lecky, History, i. 193. 

2 Defoe, Complete Tradesman, u. s., p. 74. 3 Swift, Examiner, No. 13. 

4 Boswell, Life of Johnson (7th edn.), ii. 108. 

5 Harrison, Description of England, Book III., ch. iv. (edn. 1577), page 
9, Camelot Series edn. 



324 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

at first equal, and afterwards superior, to her agriculture, so 
that a rich mill-owner or iron-master became as important 
as a large landowner. The monopoly of the landed interest 
was broken by capital. Nowhere perhaps is the contrast 
between the old and new classes in the last century seen 
more closely than in Sir Walter Scott's novel Bob Boy, 
where the old Tory squire who held fast to Church and 
king is contrasted with the new commercial magnate who 
supported the House of Hanover. 1 But already the com- 
mercial element was coming to the front in politics. 

In very few periods of English political history was the 
commercial element so strong as in the early Hanoverian 
days under the regime of Walpole and Pelham. 2 The 
questions that excited most interest in Parliament were 
chiefly those connected with commerce and finance. 3 Burke, 
writing in 1752, summed up the requirements of a Member 
of the House of Commons in a plaintive sentence, 4 which 
illustrates the tendency of the time : " A man, after all, 
would do more by figures of arithmetic than by figures of 
rhetoric." A rhetorician himself, he meant, in this utter- 
ance, to be sarcastic ; but it would be well if it were possible 
for orators to remember that two and two can only make 
four, and that the figures of arithmetic are safer guides for 
the statesman than the hyperboles of oratory. The intro- 
duction of the mercantile element into Parliament, and 
into the ranks of the aristocracy, though by no means an 
unmixed blessing, has yet had the healthy effect of keep- 
ing the English nobility in touch with the mass of the 
people, 5 and of connecting all ranks together in the common 
interests of the national life. 

§ 194. The Coming of the Capitalists. 
Now, although the commercial capitalist was fast coming 
into prominence as the rival of the landowner, 6 he was 

1 This illustration is due to W. Clarke, in Fabian Essays, p. 78. 

2 Of. Lecky, History, i. 433. 3 lb. 4 Prior, Life of Burke, i. 38. 
5 Cf Lecky, History, i. 170 sqq., on the English aristocracy ; and also 

Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 63. 

* Cunningham, Growth of Industry , ii. 6, remarks : " From the beginning 
of the eighteenth century onwards the monied interest has overbalanced the 
landed interest." This is partially true, but the capitalist hardly over' 



THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION 325 

becoming still more prominent as the master of the work- 
men whom he < employed. For before the Industrial Re- 
volution the capitalist had occupied a comparatively sub- 
ordinate place. 1 Of course capitalists existed, as they have 
always done, but their power was small as compared with 
that of their successors to-day. 2 The vast enterprises of 
modern industry, such as railways or mills, which often 
require so large an expenditure of capital before they can 
begin to be in any way remunerative, were practically un- 
known a century ago. The industrial system was, more- 
over, far less complicated, far less international, far less 
subdivided. 3 Instead of the great capitalist manufacturers 
of to-day, who can control the markets of a nation, England 
possessed numbers of smaller capitalists, 4 with far less 
capital, both individually and in the aggregate, than that 
which is now required by a man who undertakes even a 
moderate business. The great capitalists of the last cen- 
tury were chiefly the foreign trading companies. But home 
manufactures, although greatly developed, 5 were still largely 
conducted upon the domestic system, and the small capi- 
talist-artisan was a conspicuous feature of that time, just as 
the large mill-owner or iron-master is of our own day. 
Manufactures were carried on by a number of small master- 
manufacturers, 6 who gave out work to be done in the homes 
of their employes ; and who often combined agricultural 
with manufacturing pursuits. 7 But, nevertheless, there were 
signs of the approach of the methods of modern capitalism, 
and of production upon a large scale. It was becoming in- 
balanced the landowner yet, though he was becoming on more equal terms 
with him. 

1 Cf. Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 52. 

2 Cunningham, Growth of Indtistry, ii. 5, dates the rise of the capitalist 
class "from the time of Elizabeth onwards." This is rather to antedate 
their coming into prominence. 

3 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk. I. ch. i. , remarks that it is im- 
possible to collect all the workmen in different branches of a manufacture 
into the same "workhouse" {i.e., mill). In his time the huge modern 
factory was unknown. (Cf. Rogers' edition of Smith, Vol. I. p. 6, note.) 

4 Toynbee, Indust. Revolution, p. 53. 

5 Cf. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk. I. ch. xi. (Vol. I. p. 260, Clarendon 
Press edition). 

6 Toynbee, Indust. Revolution, 53. 7 Cf. Rogers, Hist. Agric. , v. 810. 



326 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

creasingly the custom to employ a large number of workpeople 
together under one roof, or at least under the direction and 
supervision of one great manufacturer. Arthur Young, for 
instance, mentions a silk mill at Sheffield with 152 hands, 
a large number in the eighteenth century ; a factory at 
Boynton with 150 hands; and a master-manufacturer at 
Darlington who ran above fifty looms. 1 Work was also 
given out by capitalist manufacturers or merchants to work- 
men to do at home in the villages and towns. These 
workmen were, like the employes of the present day, 
entirely dependent upon their employer for work and wages. 
Thus at Nottingham, in 1750, we find fifty master-manu- 
facturers who "put out " work in this way for as many as 
1200 looms in the hosiery trade. 2 

§ 195. The Class of Small Manufacturers. 

But although the coming of the capitalists was now near 
at hand, the old order of things was not seriously disturbed 
till the application of steam power to machinery some years 
later. There were still many small manufacturers who lived 
on their own land and worked with their workpeople in 
their own houses. Defoe, in his Tour through Great Britain 
(made in 1724-26), gives an interesting account of this 
class at a time when they were in the height of their pros- 
perity, before machinery and steam had even begun to cause 
their disappearance. Speaking of the land near Halifax, in 
Yorkshire, he says : 3 " The land was divided into small 
enclosures, from two acres to six or seven each, seldom more, 
every three or four pieces of land having a house belonging 
to them ; hardly a house standing out of speaking distance 
from another. We could see at every house a tenter, and 
on almost every tenter a piece of cloth or kersie or shalloon. 
At every considerable house there was a manufactory. 
Every clothier keeps one horse at least to carry his manu- 
factures to the market ; and every one generally keeps a 
cow or two or more for his family. By this means the 

1 Young, Northern Tour, i. 134 ; ii. 8, 467 (ed. 1770). 

2 Toynbee, Indust. Revolution, 53 ; Felkin, History of Hosiery, 83. 

3 Tour, iii. pp. 144-146. 



THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION 327 

small pieces of enclosed land about each house are occupied, 
for they scarce sow corn enough to feed their poultry. The 
houses are full of lusty fellows, some at the dye-vat, some at 
the looms, others dressing the cloths ; the women and 
children carding or spinning ; being all employed, from the 
youngest to the oldest." And Defoe adds a remark which 
is certainly not applicable either to Halifax or to any other 
manufacturing town of the present day, for he concludes his 
description with the words : " not a beggar to be seen, or 
an idle person." 1 

§ 196. The Condition of the Manufacturing Population. 

For it is a significant fact that under the old domestic 
system, simple and cumbrous as it was, the manufacturing 
population was very much better off than it was for some 
time after the Industrial Revolution. For one thing, they 
still lived more or less in the country, and were not crowded 
together in stifling alleys and courts, or in long rows of 
bare smoke-begrimed streets, in houses like so many dirty 
rabbit-hutches. Even if the artisan did live in a town at 
that time, the town was very different from the abodes of 
smoke and dirt which now prevail in the manufacturing 
districts. It had a more rural character. 2 There were no 
tall chimneys, belching out clouds of evil smoke ; no huge, 
hot factories with their hundreds of windows blazing forth 
a lurid light in the darkness, and rattling with the whirr 
and din of ceaseless machinery by day and night. There 
were no gigantic blast furnaces rising amid blackened heaps 
of cinders, or chemical works poisoning the fields and trees 
for miles around. These were yet to come. The factory 
and the furnace were almost unknown. Work was carried 
on by the artisan in his little stone or brick house, with the 
workshop inside, where the wool for the weft was carded 
and spun by his wife and daughters, 3 and the cloth was 

1 Tour, iii. p. 146. 

2 Gf. Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 480. 

3 At Armley ' ' many persons who have small farms also carry on cloth- 
making, employing their wives, children, and servants." Report from the 
Committee on the state of the woollen manufacture ; Reports, 1806, iii. 602 ; 
also the quotation from Defoe, just above. 



328 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

woven by himself and his sons. He had also, in nearly all 
cases, his plot of land near the house, 1 which provided him 
both with food and recreation, for he could relieve the 
monotony of weaving by cultivating his little patch of 
ground, or feeding his pigs and poultry. The woollen 
weavers, especially, in all parts of the country appear to 
have had allotments or large gardens, 2 some of which still 
exist ; and even at the beginning of the nineteenth century 
there was a large part of the manufacturing population 
which was not yet divorced from rural employments. 3 

§ 197. Two Examples of Village Life. 

The old conditions of life in English villages under this 
domestic system, with its healthy combination of agricul- 
tural and manufacturing industry, and its prevalence of 
bye -industries, are even yet not entirely forgotten, and 
may be here illustrated by personal testimonies, one from 
the south and the other from the north of England. A 
most interesting picture of life in a Hampshire village is 
thus drawn by the late Professor Thorold Rogers. 4 " In 
my native village [West Meon] in Hampshire, I well re- 
member two instances of agricultural labourers who raised 
themselves through the machinery of the allowance system 5 
to the rank and fortunes of small yeomen. Both had large 
families, and both practised a bye-industry. The village 
was peculiar in its social character, for there was not a 
tenant-farmer in it, all being freeholders or copyholders. 
There was no poverty in the whole place. Most of the 
labourers baked their own bread, brewed their own beer, 
kept pigs and poultry, and had half an acre or an acre to 
till for themselves as part of their hire. The rector built 
extensively parsonage, schools, and finally church, from his 
own means, and, therefore, employment was pretty general. 

1 Arthur Young, Farmer's Letters, i. 205, and cf. Toynbee, Indust. 
Rev., p. 68. 

2 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 480. I might add from personal 
observation the case of the place still known as the " Woolsorters' 
Gardens " at Heaton, near Bradford, Yorks. 

3 Cunningham, u. s., ii. 481. 

4 Six Centuries, p. 502. 6 See below, pp. 408, 412-414. 



THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION 329 

The village mason became a considerable yeoman. But the 
two labourers of whom I am speaking had their allowances, 
and lived on their fixed wages, with the profits of their 
bye-labour . . . and the produce of their small curtilage." 
Thus the prevalence of bye-industries, combined with allot- 
ments, gave the labourer and artisan, under the domestic 
system, a far better chance of gaining a comfortable and 
healthy livelihood than he possessed in those cases where 
the factory system had deprived him of these advantages. 

The other picture is from a writer * who derives his ex- 
perience from the northern counties. Speaking of English 
village life, " as it existed in the memory of many now 
living," he remarks : " The village combined agricultural 
with industrial occupation ; the click of the loom was heard in 
the cottages ; the farmyard and the fields, the cottages and 
the allotment gardens, made a delightful picture of rural 
life. The land was mainly freehold ; the farmers were of 
the yeoman class, and not infrequently combined the calling 
of a clothier or master manufacturer along with that of 
farming. The farmer's wife, although born with a silver 
spoon, was industrious and thrifty ; with her own hand she 
would churn the butter, make the cheese, cure the bacon 
and ham, or bake the bread ; her daughters would assist in 
spinning the yarn, or knitting the stockings ; and from the 
cloths woven under their supervision they would, with the 
assistance of the village dressmaker, make their own dresses. 
If you entered one of the cottages you would find the master 
of the house in the ' chamber/ sitting at the loom, busy 
throwing the shuttle, weaving a piece of cloth ; his daughter 
would be sitting at the wheel, spinning weft ; and the good 
wife would be busy with her domestic duties. One son 
would be out working on the land for the farmer; another 
would be working on the weaver's allotment. Down in 
their little allotment plot they grow their own vegetables, 
and a little crop of oats, which they have ground into oat- 
meal for making their porridge ; they also keep a pig or 
two, and provide their own bacon and ham. They are on 
good terms with the master -manufacturer — that is, the 

1 Thomas Illingworth, Distribution Reform (Cassell, London, 1885), p. 81. 



330 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

gentleman who gives them warp and weft to weave into 
cloth. He is also a large farmer, and in the hay-harvest 
and corn-harvest they all have a fine time in the fields, 
giving a hand to the cutting, the harvesting, and home- 
carrying of the crops. . . . Their chief articles of food are 
produced from the land immediately surrounding them. 
Their means of subsistence and comfort are not to be com- 
puted by the amount of their earnings in money-wages, but 
the produce of their bit of land, and the ease and cheapness 
with which they can obtain other necessities." x 

It will thus be seen that the old domestic system had, 
at least for the working-classes, many advantages, some of 
which have not been even yet perhaps quite compensated 
by the undoubted benefits of the Industrial Revolution. 
It is foolish, as well as inaccurate, to imagine that the past 
must have been necessarily better than the present ; but, 
on the other hand, it may readily be admitted that there 
are many single features in it which compare more than 
favourably with those of to-day, though the general outline 
of the present may be superior. 

Work, for instance, was more regular than it often is at 
present, for there were fewer commercial fluctuations ; 2 
fashions did not change so quickly, and the market for 
homespun fabrics was always steady and assured. The 
relations between employers and employed were far closer ; 
even the distribution of wealth was comparatively more 
equal. 3 Wages were somewhat less in money value than 
at present, but, then, prices of food and rent were only 
about half what they are now. Arthur Young gives 
9s. 6d. as the average weekly wages of an artisan in the 
North and Midland counties, though in some cases they 
were much higher, while the average rent for a cottage in 
the same counties he puts at 28s. 2d. a year, or only 6|d. 
per week. 4 And it must be remembered that this included 

1 The writer means that most of these could be obtained from their own 
work, or from their neighbours, who practised other bye-industries ; cf. pp. 
82-83 of the book quoted. 

2 Cf. Toynbee, Indust. Revolution, p. 71. 3 lb. 

4 Young, Northern Tour, iv. 470-472 (wages), 435-439 (rent) ; ed. 1770. 
The wages of hand wool combers in 1747 were 12s. to 21s. a week, accord- 
ing to Burnley, Wool and Woolcombing, p. 159. 



THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION 331 

a piece of land round the cottage. Meat, also, was cheap, 
being from 2jd. to 3jd. per pound; and bread Ijd. a 
pound. 1 In fact, we may confidently say that artisans, 
especially spinners and weavers, were well off about 1760. 
Adam Smith testifies to this in the Wealth of Nations. 
" Not only has grain become somewhat cheaper/' he says, 
" but many other things from which the industrious poor 
derive an agreeable and wholesome variety of food have 
become a great deal cheaper." 2 And the healthy condition 
of industry in general is shown by the fact that at the 
close of the wars with France, by the Peace of 1763, when 
more than 100,000 men accustomed to war were thrown 
upon the country, and had to find work or else be sup- 
ported in some way or other, " not only no great convulsion, 
but no sensible disorder arose." 3 



§ 198. Condition of the Agricultural Population. 

Nor was that convenient plenty which was the lot of the 
manufacturing portion of the people confined only to that 
section. The condition of the agricultural labourer, who 
was generally the worst off of all classes, from being so much 
under the direct supervision of his master, had considerably 
improved, together with the general improvement of agri- 
culture spoken of in a previous chapter. The price of corn 
had fallen, while wages had risen, though these were less 
than an artisan's, being, according to Arthur Young's 
average estimate for the North and Midland counties, about 
7s. a week. 4 But it was generally 8s. or 10s., while the 
board of a working man may be placed at about 5 s. or 6s. 
a week. 5 Cottages were occasionally rent free, or, at any 
rate, only paid a low rent, never more than 50s. or 60s. 
per year, 6 and generally much less. Moreover, just as 

1 Young, Northern Tour, iv. 451 sqq. 

2 Wealth of Nations, Bk. I. ch. viii. (i. 82, Clarendon Press edn.). 

3 Wealth of Nations. Bk. IV. ch. ii. (ii. 43, Clarendon Press edn. ). 

4 Northern Tour, iv. 445. The exact average is 7s. Id. He gives board 
as 8d. a day in the North and lOd. in the South. lb., iv. 441. 

5 Of. A Table of Wages and Prices of Commodities during three important 
Epochs of English Industry, by Thomas Illingworth (Bradford). 6 lb. 



332 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

artisans added to their earnings by agricultural work, so, 
too, agricultural labourers increased their wages by such 
bye-industries as spinning and lace-making. 1 There was an 
abundance of food, clothing, and furniture. 2 Wheat-bread 
had almost entirely superseded rye-bread. 3 Every poor 
family now drank tea, which had formerly been a costly 
luxury. 4 The consumption of meat was, says Arthur 
Young, " pretty considerable," and that of cheese " im- 
mense." 5 An earlier writer states that the labourers, " by 
their large wages and the cheapness of all necessaries, 
enjoyed better dwellings, diet, and apparel in England than 
the husbandmen or farmers did in other countries." 6 Cer- 
tainly Arthur Young was struck with the difference between 
the agricultural population of England and that of France, 
which latter country he visited shortly before the Revo- 
lution, 7 when the misery of the labourer was at its 
lowest depth, owing to the extortions of the privileged 
noblesse. 

§ 199. Growth of Population. 

But not only had the condition of the industrial popula- 
tion improved in the period 1700-1750, but their numbers 
had, as a consequence, also considerably increased. The 
figures rose from 5,475,000 in 1700 to 6,467,000 in 
1750. 8 And now, too, was beginning that great shifting 
of the centres of population, from the South to the North 
of England, which is so important a feature in the new 
industrial epoch. The most suggestive fact of this period 
is the growth of the population of Lancashire and of the 
West Riding of Yorkshire, 9 which were rapidly becoming 

1 Cf. Davies, Case of Labourers in Husbandry (1795), p. 83 ; Arthur 
Young, Annals of Agriculture, xxv. 344, 484, and xxxvii. 448. 

2 Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk. I. ch. viii. (Vol. I. p. 82). 

3 Young, Farmer's Letters, i. 207, 208 (edn. 1771). 

* lb., pp. 200, 297 ; Eden, State of the Poor, iii. 710. 

5 Young, Travels in France, ii. 313 (ed. 1793, Dublin). 

6 Chamberlayne, State of Great Britain (1737), p. 177. 

7 See his Travels in France. 

8 See The Statistical Journal, xliii. 462. 

9 For the migration of population from Devonshire and the " cider coun- 
ties " to Yorkshire, cf. Massie's Observations on the New Cyder Tax (1764), 



THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION 333 

the seats of the cotton and coarse woollen manufactures. 
Similarly also Staffordshire and Warwickshire, the pottery 
and hardware centres, were growing in numbers, 1 and so, 
too, were Durham and Northumberland, whose coal-fields 
were now far more developed than before. 2 On the other 
hand, the population of the Western and Eastern counties, 
still large manufacturing centres, had increased very little. 3 
But in the North and North-west the increase was 
enormous. Between 1685 and 1760 the people of Liver- 
pool had increased tenfold, of Manchester fivefold, of 
Birmingham and Sheffield sevenfold. 4 The total population 
of England had increased from the five millions or so of the 
Elizabethan period, to not much less than eight millions in 
Arthur Young's time, and far more of these were in the 
northern portions of the country than was the case even in 
Defoe's time. Defoe said, in 1725, " the country south of 
the Trent is by far the largest, as well as the richest and 
most populous." 6 But forty or fifty years later the shifting 
towards the North had already made itself felt. 7 The 
cause of the great increase of population between 1700 
and 1760 is to be found in the rapid increase of national 
wealth gained by foreign commerce, and in the progress of 
home manufactures and of agriculture. These in turn led 
to a greater demand for labour, and, in consequence, to 
higher wages. Increased wealth and higher wages mean 
increased comfort in living, increased command of food, and 
consequently better chances of survival among children born 
of poor parents. 8 Now, in this period the increase in 
national wealth was, in spite of foreign wars, enormous ; 
for if England had to pay heavily for these wars, other 
countries had to pay more heavily still, and were, moreover, 

No. 4. Of. also Toynbee's chapter on Population in his Industrial Revolu- 
tion, pp. 32 to 38. 

1 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 35. 

2 76., p. 35. 3 lb., -p. 35. 

4 See the figures in Toynbee, Ind. Rev., p. 36. 

5 It was 7,428,000 in 1770, and 8,675,000 in 1790. Statistical Journal, 
xliii. 462. 6 Tour, iii. 57 (7th edn.). 

7 See Toynbee's careful analysis, Indust. Rev., p. 35. 

8 Cf. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk. I. ch. viii. (Vol. I, pp. 84, 85, 
Clarendon Press edn.), on " the liberal reward of labour," 



334 



INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 



the battle-grounds of contending armies, while our own land 
was at least free from invasion. 

§ 200. England still mainly Agricultural, 

Of the population of the country at this time the 
majority were still engaged in agriculture, and the agri- 
cultural labourers alone formed one-third of the working 
classes, while a large number even of the manufacturing 
classes still worked in the fields for a portion of the year, 
especially in harvest time. 1 In 1770 England was still 
mainly an agricultural country, and Arthur Young estimates 
that the income of the agricultural portion of the nation 
was larger than that of all the rest of the community. But 
it must be remembered that by far the largest portion of 
this income was in the hands of the great landowners and 
the farmers, the share of the labourer being, of course, much 
smaller. Arthur Young's estimates must be taken with 
a certain amount of caution, but they are probably approxi- 
mately correct, and are certainly interesting as giving us 
a very fair idea of the distribution of occupations and 
national wealth just before the Industrial Revolution. 
Hence I append a small table, giving in round numbers 
the figures of his estimates. 2 It will be noticed that the 
number of the population is rather too high, but the pro- 
portion of one class to another is probably correct. 



INCOMES OF VAKIOUS CLASSES. 2 

IN MILLION POUNDS. 



5 






... Interest on capital 5 


1-5 




... Paupers 1*5 


5 




... Military and Official 5 


5 


... Professions 5 


10 


... Commercial 10 


27 


. . . Manufacturing 27 


66 



Agricul- 
tural 66 



Totai=£119,500,000. 

1 Cf. above, p. 330. 

2 Cf. Arthur Young, Northern Tour, iv. 543-547 (ed. 1770). 

3 The lines here are drawn to scale. 



THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION 335 

POPULATION, IN MILLIONS. 



•5 


Paupers *5 

... Military and official '5 
... Professional '2 




■5 




•2 




•7 


... Commercial '7 






Manufacturing 3 


3 


Agricultural 3' 6 



3 6 

Total = 8,500,000. 

It will be perceived that the agriculturists, though only 
about half a million more in numbers than the manufactur- 
ing classes, had a far larger proportionate income, in fact, 
more than double. This was of course partly due to the 
agricultural improvements of this period, and to the fact, 
that manufactures were still carried on almost solely by 
hand, thus giving only a small production from a good 
many workmen. But the Industrial Revolution rapidly 
changed all this, and now agriculture is no longer the staple 
industry of the country. We may here refer to what has 
been previously mentioned in regard to the agricultural 
development on enclosed land, and to the superiority of the 
results of enclosures over those of the common fields. 1 Those 
farmers and large owners who understood the best way of 
raising crops prospered, and more and more land was 
enclosed every year to grow corn (which, by the way, was 
rapidly rising in price), clover, turnips, and other root- 
crops. No less than 700 Enclosure Acts 2 were passed 
between 1760 and 1774. Corn was becoming a more 
valuable crop owing to the increase of population, and now, 
for the first time in English history, it became necessary to 
import it. 3 The old common fields were beginning to 
disappear, and the working classes also lost their rights of 
pasturing cattle on the wastes, for wastes now were en- 

1 Above, p. 275. 

2 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 476. 

3 The period 1766 to 1773 is said to have been the time when our imports 
first began to exceed our exports (West, Price of Corn (1826), p. 10), but 
Prothero, Pioneers of English Farming, p. 88, says that it was not till 1793 
that the imports finally out-balanced the exports, 



336 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

closed. 1 It must be admitted that the old common-field 
system produced very poor results, 2 but the loss of his 
common rights was very disastrous to the labourer, for it 
drove him from the land at the same time as the growth 
of manufactures attracted him from it, 3 and thus the 
labourer became in a few years completely divorced from 
the soil. At present attempts are being made to attract 
him back to it by offering him small strips of inferior land 
at a high rent. 4 This is known as the allotment system. 
It need scarcely be said that, as at present carried out, it is 
hardly likely to replace the almost universal allotments of 
previous times. 

§ 201. The Domestic System of Manufacture. 

But in the period we are now speaking of, the period 
before the great inventions, neither the agricultural labourer 
nor the manufacturing operative was quite divorced from 
the land. The weavers, for instance, often lived in the 
country, in a cottage with some land attached to it. 5 But 
in other respects there had certainly been changes in the 
industrial system before 1760. At first the weaver had 
furnished himself with warp and weft, worked it up, and 
brought it to the market himself ; 6 but by degrees this 
system grew too cumbersome, and the yarn was given out 
by merchants to the weaver, and at last the merchant got 
together a certain number of looms in a town or village, 
and worked them under his own supervision. 7 But even 
yet the domestic system, as it is commonly called, retained 

1 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, pp. 69, 101. 2 Above, p. 275. 

3 Or, when they did not attract him away, they took from him to a very 
great extent his bye-industries of spinning, &c. Cf. Cunningham, Growth 
of Industry, ii. 483. 

4 The writer was much blamed for this remark when it was first made in 
1890. But he cannot see any reason to alter it. Allotment-land is not 
usually the best in a parish, though labourers often get very good results 
from it ; and the rents charged are certainly far in excess of those on 
farmers' land. For rents of allotments and results of labour, see the 
article by Bolton King, Statistics of some Midland Villages, in the Economic 
Journal for March 1893. 

5 " Manufactures were little concentrated in towns, and only partially 
separated from agriculture." Toynbee, Indust. Rev., p. 53. 

6 Toynbee, u. s., p. 54, 7 lb. 



THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION 337 

in many if not in most cases the distinctive feature that 
the manufacturing industry was not the only industry in 
which the artisan was engaged, but that he generally 
combined with it a certain amount of agricultural work in 
the cultivation of his own small plot of land. 1 This fact 
explains to some extent the comparative comfort of the 
operative in this cottage industry, for that they were fairly 
well off is the testimony of Adam Smith, 2 in 1776. Com- 
mercial fluctuations were few, and the home market was 
steady, for manufacturers — which term meant both a master- 
manufacturer and an ordinary weaver — worked not so much 
for a comparatively unknown and vague " market " as for 
some particular customer, or for some well-known local 
demand. Instead of the manufacturer going to the mer- 
chant, the latter often came to the manufacturer, as did 
the London merchants, who came down to the North- 
country manufacturers, paid them in cash, and took 
away their purchases themselves. 3 On the other hand, 
however, we have the picture of the " grass farmers " near 
Leeds, as late as 1793, who used to buy the wool they 
worked, and go through the whole process of converting it 
into cloth, and go to market twice a week to sell it. 4 This 
is a good example of the combination of agriculture and 
manufactures under the domestic system. It is noticeable 
also that capital, though it existed in smaller amounts, was 
nevertheless in a larger number of hands. 5 The poet's 
vision of " contentment spinning at the cottage door" was 
not altogether imaginary, for women and children, as we 
have seen, shared in the common task brought home by the 
head of the family. The enormous difference between the 

1 This had been the case also in Elizabethan times, for § 23 of the Act 5 
Eliz. , c. 4, shows that the weaving of linen and household cloth was often 
combined with agriculture. For cloth- weaving carried on in the mansions 
of the nobility and gentry, cf Rogers, Economic Interpretation of History, 
p. 84. See also W. Radcliffe's interesting evidence in Baines, Cotton 
Manufacture, p. 337. 

2 Wealth of Nations, Bk. I. ch. viii. (Vol. I. p. 82, Clarendon Press 
edition). 

3 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 55. 

4 Young, Annals of Agriculture, xxvii. 309, 

5 Cf. Toynbee, Indust. Revolution, p. 52. 

Y 



338 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

old domestic system and the modern factory methods may 
be illustrated from the pottery manufacture by a quotation 
which certainly does not err in affording too bright a view 
of the former. " In the wilder districts of the moorlands a 
pot-work would be carried on by the joint exertions of a 
single man and his son or a labourer. The one dug the 
necessary clay, the other fashioned and lined the ware, 
whilst the mother or daughter, when the goods were ready, 
loaded the panniered asses and took her way to distant 
town and hamlet till her merchandise was sold. She then 
returned with shop-goods to the solitary pot-work." 1 This 
was the domestic system in its most elementary form, and 
is a curious contrast to the conditions which prevail in the 
present pottery factories of Staffordshire. 

But, even in this simple state of industry, trade was by 
no means so restricted and hampered as some writers have 
seemed to suppose. On the contrary, there was, in spite of 
bad roads, 2 very frequent and considerable internal com- 
munication for manufacturing purposes, and this was 
facilitated by means of the local fairs and markets, the 
importance of which in those days cannot be easily over- 
rated. Manufacturers would ride a long way to buy wool 
from the farmers, or at the great fairs already mentioned, 
such as that of Stourbridge, 3 which was sufficiently con- 
siderable even a hundred years ago, or those of Lynn, 
Boston, Gainsborough, and Beverley, all four of which 
were celebrated for their wool-sales. 4 This wool was 
brought home and sorted, then sent out to the hand- 
combers, 6 and on being returned combed was again sent 

1 Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 170. 

2 On the subject of roads there is somewhat conflicting evidence. Arthur 
5^oung constantly refers to the villainous character of the roads he tra- 
versed, at the very time when Henry Homer (in 1767) was praising the 
improved character of all means of communication (An Enquiry into the 
Means of Preserving the Publick Roads). The apparent discrepancy is 
probably due to the fact that there was no uniformity in the country, and 
some roads were much worse than others ; cf W. C. Sydney, England in 
the Eighteenth Century, ii. 1-43, and Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 
374-378. 

3 Above, p. 143. 4 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 55. 
5 Burnley, Wool and Woolcom bing, p. 159, mentions how master wool- 



THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION 339 

out, often to long distances, to be spun. It was, for 
instance, sent from Yorkshire to Lancashire, and gangs of 
pack-horses laden with wool were always to be met plod- 
ding over the hills between these two counties. 1 In the 
same way silk was sent from London to Kendal and back. 2 
When spun, the tops, or fine wool, were entrusted to some 
shopkeeper to " put out " among the neighbours. 3 Then 
the yarn was brought back and sorted by the manufacturer 
himself into hanks, according to the counts and twists. 
The hand-weavers would next come for their warp and 
weft, and in due time bring back the piece, which 
often was sent elsewhere to be dyed. Finally, the 
finished cloth was sent to be sold at the fairs, or at the 
local " piece halls " of such central towns as Leeds or 
Halifax. 4 

Hence it will be seen that there was a considerable 
diffusion 5 of work under the old system, and it was not 
necessary for great numbers of people to live close together, 
or to work in factories upon a large scale. Things were done 
with greater leisure, and more time was taken over them. 
It was possible, and it seemed even desirable, to regulate 
the industries of the country in a manner which now would 
be regarded as both harmful and futile. For with the 
Industrial Revolution, English industry outgrew the various 
regulations and conditions which had been previously 
placed upon it. 6 The regulations of apprenticeship, for 
instance, which were supposed to guarantee to some extent 

combers would buy wool from the staplers, and give it out to hand wool- 
combers for combing. 

1 Smiles, Lives of the Engineers (Metcalfe and Telford), p. 31. 

2 Young, Northern Tour, iii. 171, 173 (ed. 1770). 

3 So in Huntingdonshire in 1793, A. Young says, " women and children 
may have constant employment in spinning yarn, which is put out by the 
generality of the country shopkeepers." Annals of Agriculture, xxi. 170 ; 
tf. also Radcliffe in Baines, Cotton Manufacture, p. 338. 

4 Cf Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 54. 

5 " In 1790 there were thirty cloth factories in Warminster, all busy and 
prosperous. They were not factories in the present sense, but, rather, 
clothing shops, in which only the finishing processes were effected, spin- 
ning, carding, warping, and weaving being carried on in cottages over a large 
area in the towns and in the country villages, as fifty or sixty years before 
in farmhouses." Daniell's History of Warminster (1879), p. 130. 

6 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 258. 



340 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

the skill and training of the individual workman, became 
obsolete, even in those trades to which they had been 
formerly applied, when the introduction of machinery 
caused the skill of the workman to become of less import- 
ance than the delicacy of the machine. The old conditions 
of industry merely hampered the new factory owners, and, 
therefore, were rapidly cast aside. An entirely new order 
of things arose. With the Industrial Revolution came all 
the hurry and stress of modern manufacturing life, and a 
complete change took place in the manner and methods of 
manufacture. And now, having seen how things stood 
immediately before this great change, we can proceed at 
once to the means by which it was brought about. 



CHAPTER XXI 

THE EPOCH OF THE GREAT INVENTIONS 

§ 202. The Suddenness of the Revolution and its 
Importance. 

The change, which has been briefly sketched in the pre- 
vious chapter, from the domestic system of industry to the 
modern system of production by machinery and steam power 
was sudden and violent. The great inventions were all 
made in a comparatively short space of time, and the 
previous slow growth of industry developed quickly into a 
feverish burst of manufacturing production that completely 
revolutionised the face of industrial England. In little more 
than twenty years all the great inventions of Watt, Ark- 
wright, and Boulton had been completed, steam had been 
applied to the new looms, and the modern factory system 
had fairly begun. Of course this system was not adopted 
by the country immediately or universally. In some trades 
the old domestic system persisted longer than in others, 
and weaving by hand-looms, for instance, was still practised 
as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. 1 But on 
the whole the transition was accomplished with comparative 
rapidity, and, as a consequence, the change in the industrial 
system brought great misery as well as great economic 
advantages. Nothing has done more to make England 
what she at present is — whether for better or worse — than 
this sudden and silent Industrial Revolution, for it increased 
her wealth tenfold, and gave her half a century's start in 
front of the nations of Europe. The French Revolution 
took place about the same time, and as it was performed 

1 Writing in 1885, a Yorkshire author says, " as recently as twenty-five 
to thirty years ago the manufacture of heavy woollen cloth was done by 
hand-weaving." Thomas Illingworth, Distribution Reform, p. 16. This, 
however, was hardly general so late. 

341 



342 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

amid streams of blood and flame, it attracted the attention 
of historians, many of whom have apparently yet to learn 
that bloodshed and battles are merely the incidents of 
history. The French Revolution also succeeded in giving 
birth to one of the world's military heroes, and a military 
hero naturally excites the enthusiasm of the multitude. 
Yet even the French Revolution was the result of economic 
causes that had been operating for centuries, and which had 
had their effect in England four hundred years before, at the 
time of the Peasants' Revolt. These economic causes have 
been rather kept in the background by most historians, 
who have preferred to dwell upon the antics of French 
politicians and revolutionaries, many of whom have gained 
a quite undeserved importance ; and it was hardly to be 
expected that writers should recognise the operation of such 
causes in England, more especially as their effects were not 
accentuated by political fireworks, but were even partially 
hidden by subsequent events resulting from these effects. 
Men were blinded, too, by an increase in the wealth of the 
richer portion of the nation, not even seeing whence that 
wealth proceeded, and quite ignoring the fact that it was 
accompanied by sexious poverty among the industrial 
classes. 1 Nor did historians perceive that the world- 
famous wars in which England was engaged at the close of 
the last century, and up to 1815, were necessitated by her 
endeavour to gain the commercial supremacy of the world, 2 
after she had invented the means of supplying the world's 
markets to overflowing. Economic causes were at the root 
of them all. We shall discuss later the connection between 
our foreign politics and our industry ; and we must not 

1 This is recognised by Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 443, who 
remarks, " while the gains of some of the owners of capital were sometimes 
enormous, the labourers were forced to a lower level of life." Cf. also 
Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 93. 

2 Seeley, Expansion of England, ch. ii., only partially recognises this, 
though he is pre-eminent for his accurate view of the eighteenth century 
wars. But he attributes too much weight to colonial expansion, and not 
enough to industrial and mercantile influences. England was striving 
almost as much for a market as for colonial power. See Rogers, Economic 
Interpretation, p. 323, and the chapter (xv.) on colonial trade and markets 
and wars. 



EPOCH OF THE GREAT INVENTIONS 343 

forget that, besides this revolution in manufactures, there 
was one equally important in agriculture. 1 But with this 
we must deal afterwards ; at present we must adhere to 
the subject of the development of industry by the great 
inventors. 

§ 203. The Great Inventors. 

The transition from the domestic to the factory system was 
begun by four great inventions. In 1 7 7 James Hargreaves, 2 a 
carpenter and weaver of Standhill, near Blackburn, patented 
the spinning-jenny, i.e. a frame with a number of spindles 
side by side, which were fed by machinery, and by which 
many threads might be spun at once, instead of only one, as 
had been the case in the old one-thread hand spinning-wheel. 3 
Hargreaves first used this " jenny " for some time in his 
own house, and was at once enabled to spin eight times as 
much yarn as before by using eight spindles ; but after- 
wards 16, then 20 and 30 were used, and even 120. 4 In 
1771 Arkwright 5 established a successful mill at Cromford 
on the Derwent, in which he employed his patent spinning 
machine, or " water-frame," an improvement upon a former 
invention of Wyatt's, which derived its name from the fact 
that it was worked by water-power. 6 A few years later 
(1779) both these inventions were superseded by that of 
Samuel Crompton, a spinner, but the son of a farmer near 
Bolton, 7 who added domestic spinning and weaving to agri- 
culture. His machine, the " mule,"_ combined and added 
to the principles of both the previous inventions, and was 
called by this name as being the hybrid offspring of its 
mechanical predecessors. 8 It drew out the roving {i.e. the 

1 Below, p. 430. 

3 See Dictionary of National Biography (ed. Leslie Stephen) for a concise 
life. 

3 The jenny was invented about 1764, but not patented till 12th July 
1770 : for a description see Baines, Hist. Cotton Manufacture, pp. 157-8. 

4 Baines, Cotton Manufacture, p. 159. 

5 See Diet. National Biography (ed. Leslie Stephen). 

6 Baines, Cotton Manufacture, p. 153, and description, pp. 151-153.. He, 
first tried horse-power, but it was too expensive,. 

7 Diet. Nat. Biography, xiii. 148. 

8 Baines, Cotton Manf, p. 197.. 



344 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

raw material when it has received its first twist) by an 
adaptation of the water frame, and then passed it on to be 
finished and twisted into complete yarn by an adaptation of 
the spinning-jenny. 1 This invention effected an enormous 
increase in production, for nowadays 12,000 spindles are 
often worked by it at once and by one spinner. 2 It dates 
from the year 1779, and was so successful that by 1811 
more than four and a half million spindles worked by 
" mules " were in use in various English factories. 3 Like 
many inventors, Crompton died in poverty 4 in 1827. 

These three inventions, however, only increased the power 
of spinning the raw material into yarn. What was now 
wanted was a machine that would perform a similar service 
for weaving. This was discovered by Dr Edmund Cart- 
wright, a Kentish clergyman, and was patented as the 
"power-loom" in April 1785, 5 though it had afterwards 
to undergo many improvements, 6 and did not begin to be 
much used till 1813. But the principle of it was there, 
and it was one of the most important factors in the destruc- 
tion of the old domestic system. For at first only spinning 
was done by machinery, while the weavers could still do their 
work by hand in the old methods ; and, indeed, they con- 
tinued to do so till a comparatively recent period, and many 
aged people in Northern manufacturing districts can still 
remember the old weaving industry, as carried on in the 
workmen's own houses. 7 But the improvements on Cart- 
wright's invention ultimately did away with the hand- 
weaver, as the others had abolished the hand-spinner, and 
the old form of industry was doomed. 

Its death-blow, however, was yet to come. Wondrous as 

1 Baines, Cotton Manufacture, p. 198. 

2 Romance of Trade, p. 188. z lb., p. 189. 

4 Diet. Nat. Biography, xiii. 150. 

5 Burnley, Wool and Woolcombing, p. Ill; Baines, Cotton Manf, 229, 
230 ; Diet. Nat. Biography, ix. 221. 

6 Cart wright's own attempts to work his invention were unremunerative, 
and it was not till 1801 that mills were started at Glasgow, where it was 
worked successfully. Baines, Cotton Manufacture, p. 231 ; Horrocks of 
Southport introduced further improvements in 1805 and 1813. Baines, 
u. s., pp. 234 and 235-237. 

7 Cf. previous note on page 341 above. 



EPOCH OF THE GREAT INVENTIONS 345 

were the changes introduced by the machines just spoken 
of, none of them would by themselves alone have revolu- 
tionised our manufacturing industries. Power of some kind 
was needed to work them, and water-power, 1 though used 
at first, was insufficient, and not always available. It was 
the application of steam to manufacturing processes which 
finally completed the Industrial Ee volution. In 1769, 
the year in which Wellington and Bonaparte were born, 
James Watt took out his patent for the steam engine. 2 It 
was first used as an auxiliary in mining operations, but in 
1785 it was introduced into factories, a Nottinghamshire 
cotton-spinner 3 having one set up in his works at Papple- 
wick, which had previously been run only by water-power. 
Of course the enormous advantages of steam over water- 
power soon became apparent ; manufacturers, especially in 
the cotton trade, hastened to make use of the new methods, 
and in fifteen years (1788-1803) the cotton trade trebled 
itself. 4 

It may be here remarked that most of the inventions 
and improvements were made first in the machinery used 
for making cotton cloth, and were only subsequently intro- 
duced into the woollen manufacture. Thus the spinning 
jenny, patented in 1770, was not used for woollen cloth- 
making till 1791 or a little later, 5 though it seems that 
machinery was used in the woollen cloth trade for some of 
the preparatory processes, such as carding, and even spin- 
ning, 6 about 1793. Moreover, in any trade, the introduc- 
tion of the new inventions was not either simultaneous or 
unanimous. Manufactures before the Industrial Revolution 
were, as we have seen, very widely diffused 7 throughout 
the country, and consequently in some districts improve- 

1 E.g. in Boulton's works at Soho ; Smiles, Lives of Boulton and Watt, 
p. 130. Horses were even used. lb. 

2 Smiles, Lives of the Engineers {Boulton and Watt), p. 98. 

3 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 90. 4 lb. 

5 Spinning jennies were in use at Barnstaple and Ottery St Mary in 1791 
(Young, Annals of Agriculture, xv. 494), also machinery at Kendal (ib., 
xv. 497). Benjamin Gott is said to have first introduced the jenny into 
the woollen manufacture at Leeds in 1800 ; Bischoff, Woollen Manufactures, 
i. 315. 

6 Cf. Young, Annals of Agriculture, xxvii. 310. 7 Above, page 338, 339. 



346 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

merits were introduced which did not come into use in 
others till several years later. 1 Nevertheless the great 
change proceeded on the whole with remarkable rapidity, 
and nowhere was it more noticeable than in the cotton 
trade. The manufacture of cotton cloth is comparatively 
modern in England, for it was probably not introduced 
until the early part of the seventeenth century, 2 and some 
confusion is caused in people's minds because " cottons " 
are heard of before this date, 3 But the " cottons " of 
earlier times were made entirely of wool, 4 and must have 
been only a weak imitation of real cotton cloth. In a 
work 5 by Lewis Roberts, a well-known writer on trade, 
published in 1641, we read, however: "The town of 
Manchester in Lancashire must also be herein remembered, 
and worthily, for their encouragement commended ; . . . . 
for they buy cotton wool in London that comes first from 
Cyprus and Smyrna, and at home work the same and 
perfect it into fustians, vermilions, dimities, and other 
stuffs, and then return it to London, where the same is 
vented and sold, and not seldom into foreign parts." Here 
we have probably the first notice of the making of real 
cotton cloth ; but even in this case only the weft was 
cotton thread, while the warp consisted of linen yarn, 
principally imported from Germany and Ireland ; 6 for 
there was no machinery in use fine enough to weave 
cotton only, nor had English weavers the inherited skill 
of the Oriental workmen. Hence the cotton manufacture 
did not make much progress, and the amount of cotton 
wool imported annually at the beginning of the eighteenth 
century was only about a million pounds ; 7 while the entire 

1 Cunningham also notes this : Growth of Industry, ii. 450. 

2 See article Cotton in M'Culloch's Commercial Dictionary, ed. 1844, 
p. 430 ; also Baines, Cotton Manufacture, pp. 89-112. 

3 Defoe was thus misled into thinking the cotton manufacture earlier 
than the woollen ; Tour, iii. 246. 

4 This is proved by the Act 5 and 6 Edward VI., c. 6 (1552), which was, 
"for the true making of woollen cloth," and yet includes "the cloths 
called Manchester, Lancashire, and Cheshire cottons." 

5 Treasure of Traffic (1641), p. 32. 

6 M'Culloch's Commercial Dictionary, Cotton, p. 430, 

7 lb., Table, p. 432, 



EPOCH OF THE GREAT INVENTIONS 347 

value of all cotton goods manufactured in Great Britain at 
the accession of George III. (1760) was estimated at only 
£200,000 a year. 1 Bat the progress of the Industrial 
Revolution in the cotton trade may be seen from the 
rapid increase of the import of raw cotton from this time 
onwards. From a little over one million pounds (weight) 
it rose rapidly to over four million in 1771-75, between 
six and eleven million from 1776-84, to eighteen million 
pounds in 1785, and fifty-six million pounds at the begin- 
ning of this century (1800). 2 

§ 204. The Revolution in Manufactures and the 
Factories. 

But although the Industrial Revolution was at first most 
marked in the manufacture of cotton, it rapidly extended 
to that of woollen and linen fabrics. It is impossible here, 
as well as unnecessary, to describe all the various modifica- 
tions and adaptations that were made in the various 
machines ; we can only refer to the general features of 
the great change. The most remarkable of these was 
the sudden growth of factories, chiefly, of course, at first for 
spinning cotton or woollen yarn. The old factories had 
perforce been planted by the side of some running stream, 
often in a lonely and deserted spot, very inconvenient for 
markets and the procuring of labour ; but necessarily so 
placed for the sake of the water. 3 Hence at first there 
was no reason to concentrate large numbers of mill-hands 
in towns, as is necessary now. Those of my readers who 
know Yorkshire or Lancashire fairly well, may remember 
how frequently, in the course of some long country walk 
near Bradford, Halifax, Leeds, or Manchester, they come 
upon the ruins of some old mill, crumbling beside a rushing 
stream, a silent relic of the old days before the use of 
steam. How wonderful must the first rude inventions have 
seemed to the workers in those old factories, as the strange 
new machinery rattled and shook in the quiet country 

1 Estimated by Dr Percival, of Manchester ; M'Culloch, u. s., p. 430. 

2 Tables in M'Culloch's Commercial Dictionary, p. 432 (ed. 1844). 

3 Above, p*. 345 ; cf. Taylor, Modem Factory System, p. 85. 



348 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

hollows, and the becks and streamlets ran down to turn the 
new spindles and looms that were to revolutionise the face 
of agricultural England. But the old water-mills gave way 
to others worked by steam power, and now it was no longer 
necessary to choose any particular site for the works, if only 
plenty of coal was available. So the new race of manufac- 
turers made haste to run up steam-factories wherever they 
could. " Old barns and cart-houses," says KadclifFe, 1 who 
wrote on the new manufactures, " outbuildings of all de- 
scriptions were repaired ; windows broke through the old 
blank walls, and all were fitted up for loom-shops ; new 
weavers 1 cottages arose in every direction." The merchants, 
too, who did not run factories on their own account, but 
merely purchased yarn, began to collect weavers around 
them in great numbers, to get looms together in a work- 
shop, and to give out warp themselves to the workpeople. 2 
And now the workers began to feel the difference between 
the old system and the new. Formerly they often used to 
buy for themselves the yarn they were to weave, and had a 
direct interest in the cloth they made from it, which was 
their own property. They were, in fact, economically inde- 
pendent. The new system made them dependent upon the 
merchant or upon the mill-owner. 3 At first, it is true, 
they gained a rise in wages, for the increase in production 
was so great that labour was continually in demand, and 
every family, says Radcliffe, 4 brought home forty to one 
hundred and twenty shillings per week. But this did not 
last very long. 5 The new machinery ...saan threw out of 
employment a number of those who had worked only by 
hand ; it enabled women and children to do the work of 

1 Quoted by Baines, Cotton Manufacture, pp. 338, 339. W. Radcliffe's 
book is entitled, "The Origin of the New System of Manufacture, com- 
monly called ' Power Loom Weaving,' and the purposes for which this 
system was invented and brought into use fully explained in a Narrative." 
It was published in 1828. 

2 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 91. 

3 lb. " The system meant a change from independence to dependence " 
(p. 91). 

4 In Baines, Cotton Manufacture, p. 339. 

5 Lecky, History of the Eighteenth Century, vi. 205, remarks that the 
condition of the labourers began to deteriorate about 1792. 



EPOCH OF THE GREAT INVENTIONS 349 

grown men ; it made all classes of workers dependent upon 
capitalist employers ; and it introduced an era of hitherto 
unheard-of competition. The comiDg of the capitalists 
had become an accomplished fact, and with it began also 
the exploitation of labour. Of this we shall speak in 
another chapter. 1 Other national changes now demand our 
attention. 

§ 205. The Growth of Population and the Development 
of the Northern Districts. 

Two of the most striking facts of the Industrial Revolu- 
tion are the great growth and the equally great shifting of 
the population. These have been already briefly alluded 
to, but a few further details must now be added. Before 
1751 the largest decennial increase of population had been 
about 5 or 6 per cent. 2 But for each of the next three 
periods of ten years the increase became rapidly greater, 
till in 1801 it was 14 per cent, on the previous ten years, 
and reached even 21 J per cent. 3 in the period 1801 to 
1811. This last was the highest rate ever reached in 
England, and is more than double that recorded in the 
census 4 of 1881 or 1891. The population of England 
had been under 7,000,000 in 1760 ; 5 by 1821 it had 
risen 6 to about 12,000,000, and at the present moment 
it is rather more than double that number. 7 

At the same time, the great migration to the North, 
already begun before the Revolution, was now accelerated 
and completed. The main cause of it was the utilisation 
of the coalfields for fuel to turn the new machinery in the 
factories. Hitherto the counties which contained the vast 

1 Below, p. 381 sqq. 

2 Gf. the figures for each decennium in the Statistical Journal, xliii. 462 ; 
also cf. Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 87, but he is inaccurate. 

3 See the careful tables in M'Culloch's Commercial Dictionary (1844), s. v. 
Population ; also Lecky, History of the Eighteenth Century, vi. 201. 

4 It was 10-8 per cent, in 1871-81, and in 1881-91 only 8 '2 per cent. 
(United Kingdom) Census Returns, 1891. 

5 Exact figure 6,736,000 (England and Wales). Statistical Journal, 
xliii. 462. 

6 Exact figure 12,000,236. lb. 

7 Exact figure 27,482,104 (England only) in 1891 ; Census Returns. 



350 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

coal deposits, to which England owes so much of her pro- 
gress, had been neglected, but now that the wealth that 
underlay them was understood, 1 they became the natural 
home of manufacturing industries. 2 But it may be noticed 
that, even previously to the utilisation of coal, industry had 
been attracted to Lancashire and Yorkshire because these 
counties, with the numerous streams running down from 
their moors, offered a better supply of water power than the 
Southern or Eastern districts. There is little doubt also 
that the rainy climate 3 of the North-West of England 
offered greater facilities for certain branches of the cotton 
and woollen trades than the drier Eastern counties, at any 
rate, possessed. The considerations of physical geography 
as well as of geology show us that, under the new condi- 
tions of manufacture, the North- Western counties were 
obviously fitted for the great industrial part they were now 
to play in the life of the nation. 

These districts, which in the Middle Ages and even later 
had, as we saw, been comparatively deserted, 4 now became 
and have since remained the most populous and flourishing 
of all. The centres of the new factory system were now 
naturally in the North, and thither flocked the workers who 
had formerly been distributed over England in a much more 
extensive manner, or who had clustered round the great 
Eastern and South-Western centres of industry, which 
before 1760 had excelled the other centre, the West Riding, 
in prosperity. 5 But now this was changed. Before the 
Revolution, the Eastern counties, more especially about 
Norwich and the surrounding districts, had been famous for 
their manufactures of crapes, bombazines, and other fine, 
slight stuffs. 6 In the West of England the towns of Brad- 

1 Macaulay, History, ch. iii., rightly calls them " a source of wealth more 
precious than the gold mines of Peru." 

2 We may here compare Ramsay's remarks in his Physical Geology and 
Geography of Great Britain, pp. 305, 306 (ed. 1872). 

3 For statistics of rainfall, cf. Ramsay, u. s., pp. 197-199. 

4 Above, p. 107 ; cf. also Macaulay's well-known but rather exaggerated 
description of the North of England, History, ch. iii. 

5 Defoe's Tour, iii. 57 (ed. 1769). Macaulay, History, ch. iii., " A constant 
stream of emigrants began to roll northward." 

6 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 47, summarises these well-known facts* 



1700-50 

INDUSTRIAL 

ENGLAND 

Skewing PopulatloriirifirjlTwlf 
oflS^Ceniury. chief towns, ound 
TruxnjufacXures-Xh&rriostpopuLous 
COunH&s are. darh^reert 



VORsTH 
SEjL 




C H A * * 



Scale of English Miles 

10 20 30 40 50 75 100 



The majority of the population was in the west and south central counties 
(dai'k green) ; but Lanes, and the West Riding of Yorks. were increasing The 
chief manufacturing centres in (1) Eastern counties, (2) Wilts.. (3) Yorks., &c, are 
shown thus |^f|||j|jj but it must be remembered that manufactures were very 
scattered and carried on side by side with agriculture. Several other counties are 
therefore marked with slanting lines (Compare the Map opposite page 454). 



EPOCH OF THE GREAT INVENTIONS 351 

ford-on-Avon, Devizes, and Warminster had been manufac- 
turing centres noted for their fine serges ; Stroud had been 
the centre of the manufacture of dyed cloth, 1 and so was 
Taunton, for even in Defoe's time (1725) it had 1100 
looms ; 2 and the excellence of the Cotswold wool, together 
with the water power derived from its mountain streams, 
had done much for the industry of the district. 3 These 
centres and their productions, then, were far more famous 
than the third, the West Riding, including the towns of 
Halifax, Leeds, and Bradford, where chiefly coarse cloths 
were made. 4 The cotton trade of Lancashire, too, had 
previously been insignificant, for it is only incidentally 
mentioned by Adam Smith, 5 though Manchester and Bolton 
were then, as now, its headquarters. In 1760 only 40,000 
persons were engaged in it, 6 while in 1764 the value of our 
cotton exports was only one-twentieth of our woollen, 7 and 
only strong cottons, such as dimities and fustians, were 
made. But now the cotton cities of Lancashire, and the 
woollen and worsted factories of Yorkshire, far surpass the 
older 8 seats of industry in wealth and population, while the 
cotton export has risen to be the first in the kingdom, and 
the vast majority of the industrial population is now found 
North of the Trent. These great industrial changes were 
the direct consequence of the introduction of new manufac- 

1 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 47, and see note 5 on p. 339. 

2 Tour, ii 19 (ed. 1769). 

3 This is pointed out by Toynbee, Ind. Rev., p. 48. 4 lb., p. 48. 

5 Wealth of Nations, Bk. I. ch. x. (Vol. I. 127, Clarendon Press edn.). 

6 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 49. 7 lb., p. 50. 
8 "Woollen cloths, kerseymeres, blankets, etc., formed [in Wiltshire] for 

a long period a principal manufacture. From the reign of Elizabeth to 
the close of the eighteenth century, the towns of "Wiltshire lying in the 
valley of the Avon, on the north-west, and in that of the Wily in the south- 
west, Malmesbury, Chippenham, Bradford, Trowbridge, Westbury, War- 
minster, Heytesbury, and Wilton, with all the circumjacent villages, were 
largely employed in the weaving of various kinds of woollen fabrics, and 
the clothiers were men of wealth and position. This manufacture declined 
in Wiltshire very rapidly owing to the general adoption of machinery and 
the power-loom in the great factories of Yorkshire and Lancashire, and to 
the increasing consumption, throughout England and the Continent, of 
cotton and linen textures. John Aubrey held that the clothiers suffered 
in his day, because ' men would take to silk and Indian ware.' " Daniell, 
History of Warminster (1879), p. 130. 






352 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

turing processes. For the use of steam power in mills 
necessitated the liberal use of coal, and hence the factory 
districts are necessarily almost coincident with the great 
coalfields, as will be seen from any geological map. It is 
also curious to notice that each coalfield has its own par- 
ticular manufacture closely associated with it. 1 Thus the 
Yorkshire coalfield contains most of the towns where the 
woollen industry prevails, while its southern extension, which 
descends into Nottinghamshire, includes the cutlery and 
hardware district of Sheffield and the lace and hosiery of 
Nottingham. The Lancashire coalfield is almost exclusively 
surrounded by towns engaged in the cotton trade ; the i 
Staffordshire fields are connected chiefly with pottery, and,, ^ 
on their Southern limit, with hardware and machinery ; the' 
South Wales coal district is noted for its smelting and iron- 
works. Moreover, the coal industry had been developed 
almost simultaneously with the growth of manufactures, and, 
indeed, one reacted upon the other. It will be convenient 
here to mention the improvements made in coal-mining and 
in the iron trade. 

§ 206. The Revolution in the Mining Industries. 

It has been mentioned in a previous chapter 2 that the 
development of the vast natural resources of our country as 
regards coal and iron was retarded by the lack of steam 
power. But with the steam-engines of Watt and Boulton 
a new era dawned upon coal-mining. In 1774 Watt, after 
vainly advocating his invention, entered into partnership 
with Matthew Boulton, a Birmingham man, 3 who devoted 
all the capital he possessed to the introduction of Watt's 
engine into practical use. The new engine soon produced 
a vast change in the manner of pumping water from the 
mines, 4 just as it also produced other changes in every 

1 This is also noticed by H. R. Mill, Commercial Geography, pp. 44-46 
(ed. 1888), and is, of course, obvious. 
3 Above, pp. 310 to 312. 

3 See Smiles, Lives of the Engineers {Boidton and Watt), eh. viii., " Their 
Partnership," p. 146. 

4 See diagram of Watt's pumping- engine for mines in Smiles, u. «., 
ch. x. p. 180. 



EPOCH OF THE GREAT INVENTIONS 353 

manufacture dependent upon the use of coal. Steam-power 
was used not only to clear the mines of water, but also in 
sinking shafts, 1 where formerly entrance had often been 
made only by tunnelling in the side of a hill. It was used, 
too, in bringing up the coal from the pit, and in many 
other necessary processes. The result of this application of 
steam power was soon seen in the general opening up of all 
the English coal-fields, and the consequent further growth 
of towns like Newcastle, Sheffield, and Birmingham, 2 whose 
industries now depend so greatly upon a large supply of 
coal. 

With the great output of coal came an immediate revival 
of the iron trade, which it will be remembered had greatly 
declined 3 about 1737 and 1740, for as coal was not avail- 
able wood had to be used as fuel, and the consequent 
destruction of forests, especially the Sussex Wealden, had 
caused legislative prohibitions. 4 The scientific treatment of 
iron ore in the various processes of manufacture had indeed 
been improved, but nothing much could be done without 
coal. This was seen, for instance, by an iron-master, 
Anthony Bacon, in 1755, who obtained a lease, at the 
trifling rental of £200 per annum, for ninety-nine years, of a 
district at Merthyr Tydvil, eight miles long and five broad, 
upon which he erected both iron and coal works. 5 In 1 7 (3 
Smeaton's invention 6 of a new blowing apparatus at Dr 
Roebuck's works at Carron, near Falkirk, did away with 
the old clumsy bellows ; and the other inventions of the 
Cranages 7 (17 60), of Onions 8 (1783), and of Henry Cort 9 
(1784), for which separate treatises must be consulted, 
brought the manufacture of iron almost to perfection. 
Whereas about the middle of the eighteenth century we 
produced only some 18,000 tons of iron annually, 10 and had 

1 Bourne, Romance of Trade, p. 175. 

2 Both Sheffield and Birmingham only had between 20,000 and 30,000 
inhabitants about 1760 ; see Toynbee's table, Industrial Revolution, p. 36 ; 
cf. also Lecky, History of the Eighteenth Century, vi. 212. 

3 Smiles, Industrial Biography, ch. ii. p. 42. 4 lb. ch. ii. pp. 38-42. 
5 lb., ch. vii. p. 130. 6 lb., ch. viii. p. 137. 
7 lb., ch. v. pp. 86-88. 8 lb., ch. vii. p. 115. 
9 lb., ch. vii. (all). 10 lb., ch. v. p. 79. 

Z 



354 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

to import at least 20,000 tons, 1 we produced in 1788 as 
much as 68,000 tons, 2 and the production has gone on 
steadily increasing to the present time, when some five 
million tons of iron are obtained annually. 3 

§ 207. The Improvements in Communications. 

Besides these improvements in mining and machinery, 
there were also others which, though not perhaps quite so 
strikingly important, had a considerable influence upon the 
progress of industry and commerce. These were the 
improvements made in the internal communications of the 
country both by land and water. It must not be supposed, 
however, that because improvements were made the state of 
the roads was so exceedingly bad as it has been the fashion 
to describe them. There has been considerable exaggera- 
tion as to the difficulties of travelling both in mediaeval and 
later times, and there is plenty of evidence 4 which goes to 
show that matters were not invariably so bad as might be 
imagined from descriptions 5 more picturesque than accurate. 
It is certain that the cost of carriage in mediaeval times was 
cheap, and thus, by implication, that the roads were good. 
But less care seems to have been shown in maintaining them 
in later centuries, so that it is quite possible that the roads 
in England were in better repair in the reign of Edward III. 
than in that of George III. 6 Still, even in the eighteenth 
century, the evidence of Arthur Young 7 — which has been 
freely misquoted — goes to show that the state of the roads 
was not by any means so bad as we should imagine if we 
merely took our picture of them from the complaints made 
of particularly execrable sections. The turnpike roads were 

1 Scrivener, History of the Iron Trade, pp. 57, 71 ; Smiles, u. s., p. 79, 
says four-fifths of it came from Sweden. 

2 M'Culloch's, Commercial Dictionary, s. v. Iron. 

3 Year Book of Commerce. 

4 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 135 ; Economic Interpretation of History, 
p. 483. 

5 E.g. in Macaulay, History, eh. iii., which has been so freely copied by 
his inferiors. 

6 Rogers, Economic Interpretation, p. 484. 

7 Cf itinerary at end of Northern Tour, Vol, IV. 



EPOCH OF THE GREAT INVENTIONS 355 

generally in fairly good repair, and it is obvious that matters 
cannot have been so bad as is supposed, when we consider 
that in Defoe's time Manchester merchants would send their 
goods on horses right across England to Stourbridge, 1 or 
when waggons took silk from London to Kendal, 2 or when 
live geese were sent to London markets in cartloads from 
the Fens. 3 

While, however, guarding against receiving an exaggerated 
impression of the evil state of roads before the end of the 
eighteenth century, we may notice that about the middle of 
that period there were great improvements made, insomuch 
that Henry Homer, writing in 1767, declares (though 
evidently with rhetorical exaggeration) " there never was a 
more astonishing Revolution accomplished in the internal 
system of any country than has been within the compass of 
a few years in England." 4 This was due to the erection of 
turnpikes and levying of tolls under the authority of various 
Acts of Parliament ; 5 and later on there was great develop- 
ment owing to the improved methods introduced by the 
well-known road-makers, Metcalfe, Telford, and Macadam. 6 

There were also considerable improvements made in 
carriage by water. This had been a favourite mode of 
conveyance in mediaeval times, when the rivers were largely 
used, 7 and it continued to be so till, in the eighteenth cen- 
tury, rivers were supplemented or joined by canals. A 
great impetus to canal-making was given by the success of 
Brindley's efforts in 1758, when he made a canal for the 
Duke of Bridgewater's colliery at Worsley to Manchester. 8 
The importance of this canal was not due to its length, for 
it was only seven miles long, but to the fact that its con- 
struction presented serious engineering difficulties, such as 
tunnelling through rock and carrying an aqueduct over the 

1 Defoe, Tour, i. 94. 2 Young, Northern Tour, iii. 171-173 (ed. 1770). 

3 Defoe, Tour, i. 54. 

4 Homer, The Enquiry into the Means of Preserving the Publich Roads ; 
cf p. 4 seq. 

5 1 Geo II. , c. 11 ; 5 Geo. I., c. 12; 14 Geo. II., c. 42. Cf. also Smiles, 
Lives of the Engineers (Metcalfe and Telford), Vol. III. p. 69. 

6 lb. , passim. 

7 Rogers, Hist. Agric., i. p. 663 ; also i. ch. 27, and v. ch. 25. 

8 Smiles, Lives of the Engineers (Vol. I., Brindley), ch. iii. 



356 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

River Irwell. 1 Other canals followed. One of ninety-six 
miles in length, connecting the rivers Trent and Mersey, 
was finished in 1777 ; Hull and Liverpool were connected by 
another, and Liverpool with Bristol ; and in 1792 the Grand 
Junction Canal connected London with Oxford and other 
important towns in the Midlands. 2 It is curious to notice 
that on at least one of these early canals, that made from 
Worsley to Manchester, passengers were conveyed as well as 
goods. " A branch of useful and profitable carriage, hitherto 
scarcely known in England, was also undertaken, which was 
that of passengers. Boats on the model of the Dutch trek- 
schuyts, but more agreeable and capacious, were set up, 
which, at very reasonable rates and with great convenience, 
carried numbers of persons daily to and from Manchester 
along the line of the canal." 3 This branch of traffic has 
quite died out, and even the carriage of goods by water 
is now not so frequent as formerly. But it is a matter of 
regret that waterways are not more used for merchandise in 
England, as they are in some Continental countries, even 
where railways are numerous ; for in Belgium, 4 which has 
quite as many railways in proportion to its size as England, 
both canals and rivers are very widely used for the transit 
of goods, and prove of great utility. 

§ 208. The Nation's Wealth and its Wars. 

Of course all these discoveries of new processes in procur- 
ing coal and making iron, and the~lmprovements in com- 
munication, enormously increased the wealth of England, 
and at the same time entirely changed the conditions of 
industry. For they helped the textile manufactures by 
providing any amount of fuel and machinery, and all these 
together gave employment to a population that seemed to 
grow in accordance with the need of the nation for workers. 5 ~ 

1 Smiles, Lives of the Engineers (Vol. I., Brindley), ch. iii. p. 173. 

2 For a very good summary of the Canals of England and other countries, 
cf. M'Culloch's Commercial Dictionary (ed. 1844), s. v. Canals. 

3 Aikin, Description of the Country round Manchester, p. 116. 

4 This is from the writer's personal observation. 

5 "In the cotton trade," said Sir R. Peel in 1806, "machinery has given 
birth to a new population," and he ascribed this to early marriages, caused 



EPOCH OF THE GREAT INVENTIONS 357 

The new textile and mining industries supplied England 
with that vast wealth 1 which enabled her to endure success- 
fully the long years of war at the close of last century and 
the beginning of this. The Industrial Revolution came 
only just in time, for after the repose of 1763 to 1792. 
during which this silent Revolution matured and took root, 
England engaged in a struggle which she certainly could 
never have supported without a far greater national wealth 
than she possessed in the first three quarters of the eigh- 
teenth century. Even as it was, the year 1815 found a 
large portion of her people in poverty and distress, 2 while the 
industrial classes suffered heavily from the taxation which 
the war imposed. 3 But owing to her industrial develop- 
ment, the war left England at its close, in spite of all her 
troubles, the foremost nation of Europe in economic develop- 
ment, and consequently first in other matters also. As is 
the case with most modern contests, this great war originated 
in economic causes, even to a certain extent in economic 
mistakes, but it had important effects upon industry, and 
was largely affected by industrial considerations. Hence we 
must consider it rather more closely. 

by high rate of wages and comfort. Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 88, 
note. 

1 Lecky, History of the Eighteenth Century, vi. 218. This is now per- 
ceived by most historians, but at one time it was ignored. But it is now 
recognised that at the time of the Continental War " Pitt's main support 
lay in the extraordinary financial resources supplied by the rapidly increas- 
ing manufactures of England." S. R. Gardiner, Students' History of Eng- 
land, p. 835. 

2 This was the time when the Poor Rate was rising year after year, till in 
1818 it was over 13s. per head ; see below, p. 422. 

3 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 505. 



CHAPTER XXII 

WAR, POLITICS, AND INDUSTRY 

§ 209. England's Industrial Advantages in 1763. 

If we look at the state of the European Powers after the 
conclusion of the Seven Years' War by the Treaty of Paris 
in 1763, we shall see that England had achieved a very 
favourable position for the growth of her internal industries. 1 
It is true that together with the rest of Europe she had 
adopted the policy of endeavouring to secure a sole market 2 
for her goods, but though that policy was a mistake, in so 
far as it aimed at a monopoly, England was not alone in 
her error, and since other Powers were doing the same, it 
was just as well that she should hold the lead among them. 
Moreover, since we are now paying interest upon the heavy 
national bills which we ran up at that time, we may profit- 
ably examine what we gained thereby. 

In the first place, England had seriously crippled her 
powerful commercial rival, France, both in her Indian and 
American possessions. The French flag had nearly dis- 
appeared from the sea. 3 By the Seven Years' War we had 
gained Canada, Florida, and all the French possessions 
east of the Mississippi Eiver (except New Orleans) ; while 
in India our influence had become supreme, owing to the 
victories of Clive. French influence in India and America 
was practically annihilated. Spain, the faithful ally of 
France, lost with her friend her place as the commercial 
rival of England in foreign trade. Germany was again 
being ravaged by the dynastic struggles, in which Frederick 

1 Rogers, Economic Interpretation of History, pp. 290-291, gives an ad- 
mirable summary of the state of European powers at this time. Cf. also 
Leeky, History of the Eighteenth Century, iii. p. 23, as to the ascendancy 
of England at this time. 

2 Rogers, Economic Interpretation, p. 323. 
8 Lecky, History, iii. p. 23. 

358 



WAR, POLITICS, AND INDUSTRY 359 

the Great bore so prominent a part, between the reigning 
houses of Austria and Prussia. Holland was similarly torn 
by internal dissensions under the Stadtholder William V., 
which gave the rival sovereigns of Prussia and Austria a 
chance of making matters worse by their interference. By 
1790 the United Provinces had thus sunk into utter insig- 
nificance. Sweden, Norway, and Italy were of no account 
in European politics, and Russia had only begun to come 
to the front. Hence England alone had the chance of 
" the universal empire of a sole market." x The supply of 
this market, especially in our American colonies, was in 
the hands of English manufacturers and English workmen. 
The great inventions which came, as we saw, after 1763 
were thus at once called into active employment, and our 
mills and mines were able to produce wealth as fast as they 
could work, without fear of foreign competition. 

§ 210. The Mercantile Theory. 

But in some points our statesmen and merchants made a 
mistake in their policy. The commercial mind of England 
at this epoch was dominated by what is known as the 
Mercantile Theory. 2 It was a theory that had grown 
up naturally out of the spirit of Nationalism, of self- 
sustained and complete national life, that was our heritage 
from the Renaissance and the Reformation. 3 It was not 
altogether wrong, for its object was national greatness, an 
object laudable and harmless enough ; but the believers in 
the policy of increasing our national greatness also believed 
that it could only be attained in one way, and that was 
at the expense of our neighbours. It was not sufficiently 
understood that commerce, if properly carried on, is pro- 
ductive of benefit to both the trading parties ; and that 
though one side may seem to gain an advantage, there 
must be also an advantage to the other side, since other- 

1 Rogers, Economic Interpretation, p. 291. 

2 Cf. Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, ch. vii. p. 72 (on The Mercantile 
Theory) ; Cunningham, Growth of English Industry, ii. pp. 16 sqq. 
Rogers, Economic Interpretation of History, p. 323 ; also Adam Smith, 
Wealth of Nations, Bk. IV. chs. i.-viii. 

3 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 76. 






360 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

wise no one would be willing to trade. The advantages 
gained by the two parties to a bargain are not always iden- 
tical or even necessarily similar, but advantage of some kind 
must exist, for it is the essence of a bargain that each of 
the contracting parties should benefit by it. The benefit 
gained by one party may seem to the other insignificant or 
even illusory, and doubtless it often is ; but unless that 
second party imagined that he was obtaining something at 
least equivalent to what he gave to the first, he would hardly 
conclude the exchange. A Hudson's Bay fur-trader is no 
doubt amused at the folly of the Indian hunter who barters 
a valuable skin for a few drops of inferior brandy ; but 
so long as the Indian considers the doubtful joys of fire- 
water superior to the solid merits of the fur of the sable, 
the bargain is to both commercially profitable. But as 
long as the principles of barter, which underlie even the 
most complicated transactions of international commerce, 
were imperfectly understood, as indeed they still frequently 
are, it seemed to English legislators and merchants that 
foreign commerce must result in a loss to one side or the 
other, unless it was very carefully regulated ; and, fearing 
lest the loss should fall upon them, they naturally took what 
seemed the best method to avoid it. 

Nowhere, perhaps, is this seen more clearly than in the 
excessive care that was taken to prevent England from 
losing on the balance of trade by letting gold and silver go 
out of the country in exchange for foreign commodities. 
The use of the precious metals in commerce has at all 
times been imperfectly understood by veiy many of those 
who employ them, and by not a few of those who under- 
take to write about them. Hence it is not surprising to 
find that politicians and traders from the sixteenth to the 
eighteenth century believed that the country was suffering 
a severe loss when it allowed too much bullion to be 
exported in payment for foreign goods. This loss seemed 
to occur when the value of our exports did not more or 
less exactly balance the value of the imports ; and when it 
did not, the difference which England paid to the foreigner 
in coin or bullion was said to be a national loss, and the 



WAR, POLITICS, AND INDUSTRY 361 

" balance of trade," as it was called, was said to be against 
us. This was thought to be especially the case in the 
trade with East India, since large quantities of bullion 
were exported to buy the Indian commodities which were 
brought back to England. Only the more thoughtful 
writers of the seventeenth century perceived that the 
bullion exported to India was, so to speak, a seed which 
ultimately brought back a rich harvest in coin by our sale 
of spices and other Eastern commodities in the European 
market. 1 But the average politician thought that, in order 
to secure and retain wealth, it was necessary that on every 
article exported a balance in coin should eventually be paid 
to the English dealer ; and hence came those frequent 
legislative prohibitions of the export of bullion which con- 
tinued, at least in form, till 1816. 2 

§ 211. The Mercantile Theory in Practice. 
This is, however, only one example of the results of a 
theory which maintained that regulation was a vital neces- 
sity for commerce. The whole of English industry and 
commerce was permeated by the influence of this theory. 
Regulation was its keynote ; but it was regulation with a 
definite and avowed object. That object was, as hinted 
above, not only mercantile profit but political power ; and 
to political power the necessities of industry were to be 
strictly subordinate. Even in the case just quoted of the 
export of bullion, there were two motives at work in men's 
minds : the commercial desire to obtain a visible profit in 
money, and the political desire to keep in the country an 
accumulation of treasure, which might be useful in case of 
war. 3 Of these two motives the political was frequently 

1 For this trade see Mun's valuable Discourse of Trade from England 
unto the East Indies, in Purchas's Pilgrims (1625) ; also Misselden, Circle 
of Commerce (1623), p. 34; Malynes, Center of the Circle (1623), p. 114; 
Craik, British Commerce, ii. 109, 172-179 ; also Adam Smith, Wealth of 
Nations, Bk. I. ch. v., and Bk. IV. ch. i. (Vol. I. p. 45 and II. 12, Claren- 
don Press edn.). 

2 Rogers, Economic Interpretation, p. 187. 

3 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk. IV. ch. i. (Vol. II. p. 13, ed. 
cit. ), shows that even in case of war the accumulation of treasure is un- 
necessary 



362 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

the stronger, and to this we can trace the whole elaborate 
series of regulations which were imposed upon English 
industry and commerce from the days of Richard II. 1 to the 
beginning of the reign of Victoria. The mercantile system, 
thus regarded, presents a clear and interesting outline. 2 
National power depended, or seemed to politicians to 
depend, mainly on three things — (1) The accumulation of 
treasure as a fund in case of emergencies ; (2) the develop- 
ment of shipping as a nursery for the navy ; and (3) the 
maintenance of an effective population both for commercial 
and military purposes. To the first requirement we trace 
the legislative interference with the precious metals already 
alluded to ; to the second we can trace many statutes regu- 
lating the shipping trade, and more especially the famous 
Navigation Acts 3 of 1651, about which there has been so 
keen a controversy ; and to the third we may trace, though 
less distinctly, the attempts of various governments to 
regulate the agricultural industry of the country, either 
by encouraging tillage at the expense of pasturage, or by 
imposing protective duties upon a foreign food supply. 
This legislative support of agriculture has been attributed 4 
to the desire of governments to favour that " kind of 
employment which was most favourable for the mainten- 
ance of a vigorous and healthy race, and the best material 
for forming a military force." This may have been the 
case in the days when the English yeoman formed so 
important a feature in the armies of Henry V. ; but when 
the success of agriculture was so patently important to the 
income of the landowners, who for centuries formed the 
majority of the English Parliament, it is hard to believe 
that such legislation was not occasionally actuated by 
motives of obvious self-interest. It is again little less 
than absurd to regard the Corn Laws as being passed in 
order to " provide suitable conditions for the constant 
supply of food," 5 when they not only notoriously failed 
in that object, but even prevented its possible accomplish - 

1 Cf. Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. 350. 

2 lb., i. 426, ii. 16. 3 Above, p 287. 

4 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, i. 427. 

5 Cf. Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 17. 



WAR, POLITICS, AND INDUSTRY 363 

ment. It is quite possible that those who enacted them 
sincerely believed that the maintenance of a landed aris- 
tocracy was necessar} 7- to the well-being of the State, and 
that rents must at all costs be kept up ; but there are few 
mortals who are not equally convinced of the necessity of 
their own existence, and fewer still who would not joyfully 
support a series of measures which appear to be beneficial 
simultaneously to the public welfare and their private purse. 

The Mercantile System, in fact, presents a strange mix- 
ture of political expediency and personal gain. Combined 
with a sincere desire for national progress, there is the irre- 
pressible prompting of class interests. The landowners 
wanted Protection for agriculture, and the manufacturers 
wanted Protection for their home industries; and hence we find 
that while the former acquiesced in the prohibition of the 
export of wool for the sake of the manufacturing interest, 
the latter had no objection to the existence of a bounty on 
the export of corn. 1 Politics, which are at all times beset 
by the least noble of human passions, were complicated and 
degraded by the intermixture of commercial interests, 2 and 
the decline of the mercantile system was due almost as 
much to the conflicting motives which it could not help 
bringing into play as to the inherent weakness of a scheme 
which attempted to regulate a commercial and industrial 
community which had long outgrown mediaeval restrictions. 

The scheme of regulation, which was a necessary part of 
the mercantile system, is seen in every department of indus- 
try as well as of commerce, though it was applied much 
more thoroughly to external than to internal trade. 3 But 
it has been well remarked that, in an age when it was 
deemed the duty of the State to watch over the individual 
citizen in all his relations, and to provide not only for his 
protection from force and fraud, but even to assure his 
spiritual welfare, it was after all only natural that the State 
should attempt to fix a legal rate of wages just as it fixed a 
legal rate of interest, and that it should try to supervise the 
production of commodities so as to ensure to its citizens the 

1 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 79. 2 lb., p. 80. 

3 lb., p. 75. 



364 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

manufacture of honest wares. 1 Hence there grew up natur 
ally those restrictions upon industry which are embodied in 
the Acts of Apprenticeship and the Assessment of Wages. 
The former was supposed to prevent undue competition in a 
trade and to provide a suitable number of skilled workmen 
capable of turning out honest work, 2 while the latter was to 
fix a fair price for a man's labour and to secure a regularity 
of wages that would be beneficial to master and man alike. 3 
But the growth of industry and the inevitable tendencies of 
human nature rendered the first of these enactments futile 
and the second injurious, so that the great economist, who 
surveyed the system as it existed at the close of the eigh- 
teenth century, could only regard the apprenticeship and 
guild laws as causing an obstruction to the freedom of 
labour, 4 and the regulation of wages as an oppression of the 
poor by the rich. 5 The attempt of legislators to reconcile 
public welfare with private interest proved, unfortunately, 
unsuccessful. * 

§ 212. English Policy towards the Colonies. 

Nowhere, however, were the effects of the mercantile 
system so strikingly visible as in the regulations which 
were laid upon the trade with our colonial possessions ; and 
nowhere do we see more clearly the combination of national 
policy with class interests. The purpose, before referred to, of 
gaining power and wealth for the nation 6 seemed to English 
legislators to require that the colonies should be entirely 
subordinate to the mother country, and that their trade and 
industry should be regulated so as to increase at once our 
political power and our commercial wealth. Legislators 
who may have had only a desire to do what seemed best for 
the nation politically were supported by merchants whose 
private interest it was to keep the colonial trade as far 
as possible in their own hands. Hence the trade of the 

1 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 73. 

2 Cf. Adam Smith's criticism in Wealth of Nations, Bk. I. ch. x. , pt. 2 
(Vol. I. p. 125, Clarendon Press edn.). 

3 See on this point Dr Cunningham's Growth of English Industry, ii. pp. 
42-44. • ^ lb., i. p. 143. 

5 lb., i. 149 (referring to the effects of the Law of Settlement). 

6 Cf. Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 153, 154. 



WAR, POLITICS, AND INDUSTRY 365 

colonies was most carefully regulated in the interests of the 
mother country, though it is only just to observe that in the 
opinion of Adam Smith the English colonies were more 
favoured and allowed more extensive markets than those of 
any other European nation. 1 But England, like all other 
countries at that date, thought that the greatest benefits of 
Colonial, or for that matter of any other, trade could only 
be obtained by securing to itself a monopoly 2 or sole market. 
" The colonies were regarded merely as markets and farms 
of the mother country," 3 and Adam Smith was so disgusted 
at the theory of colonial possessions adopted by English 
statesmen and merchants, that he remarked bitterly that 
" to found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up 
a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit 
only for a nation of shopkeepers." 4 "The maintenance of 
this monopoly," he adds, " has hitherto been the principal, 
or more properly, perhaps, the sole end and purpose of the 
dominion which Great Britain assumes over her colonies." 5 
It has, in fact, been said that the establishment of our 
American and West Indian colonies was merely a device of 
the supporters of the Mercantile System, who founded them 
with the design of raising up a population chiefly agricul- 
tural in character, whose commerce should be confined 
entirely to an exchange of their raw products for our manu- 
factured goods. 6 This, however, is not entirely true. 
There is not the least doubt that at first the colonists were 
allowed to carry on a direct intercourse with foreign states, 
and, in fact, their charters empowered them to do so. The 
Virginian settlers, for example, established tobacco ware- 
houses in Midclleburgh and Flushing in 1620, as depots 
for their trade with the Continent. 7 It was not till the 
time of the Navigation Acts (1651 and 1660) that the 
import and export trade of the colonies was actually mono- 

1 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk. IV., ch. vii. (Vol. II. 155). 

2 Cf. Rogers, Economic Interpretation, pp. 323, 325, 330. 

3 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 81. 

4 Wealth of Nations, Bk. IV. ch. vii. (Vol. II. 196). 5 lb., Vol. II. 197. 

6 Cf. M'Culloch's Commercial Dictionary, s. v. Colonies (ed. 1844). The 
whole article on " Colonies" is worth careful reading. 

7 Robertson's America, Book IX. p. 104 (in M'Culloch, u. s.). 



366 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

polised by their mother country. The first of these Acts, 
as we know, enacted that the trade of the colonists should 
be carried on exclusively in British or colonial ships, but 
the second Act 1 went much further than this, for it enacted 
that certain specified articles — in fact, the chief products of 
the colonies — should not be exported directly from the 
colonies to any foreign country, but must be first sent to 
Britain, and there, in the words of the Act, " unladen, and 
laid upon the shore," before they could be forwarded to 
their ultimate destination, if they were meant for any 
European market. These articles became known by the 
name of " enumerated articles," and were originally limited 
to sugar, molasses, ginger, fustic, tobacco, cotton, and 
indigo ; but afterwards coffee, hides, iron, corn, and lumber 
were added. Moreover, not content with making the 
colonists sell their goods only in the English markets, it 
was enacted further 2 (in 1663) that no goods should be 
imported into the British colonies unless they were actually 
first laden and put on board at some British port, so that 
all commercial intercourse, both of export and import trade, 
had first to go through British hands. It is quite obvious 
that, apart from any considerations of national policy, these 
regulations were dictated by the class interests of British 
manufacturers and merchants. 3 Even the statesmen of the 
eighteenth century, apart from the merchants, seem to have 
thought that the colonies owed everything to England, and 
that, therefore, it was only fair that they should be exploited 
in the interests of the mother country. 4 Thus all imports 
to our colonies from any other country of Europe except 
England were forbidden, in order that our manufacturers 
might monopolise the American market. 5 The mercantile 
policy of our legislators went even further than this, for 
every attempt was made to discourage the colonists from 

ir The 12 Charles II., c. 18. 

2 M'Culloch, Commercial Dictionary, u. s., p. 318. 

3 The Bristol merchants in especial benefited from these regulations. 
Hence they talked most glibly about benefiting the mother country ; cf. 
the pamphlet called An Essay on the State of England (1697), p. 71, by 
Cary, of Bristol. 

4 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 81. 5 lb. 



WAR, POLITICS, AND INDUSTRY 367 

starting manufactures at home. The American woollen 
industry was interfered with, and the export of woollen 
manufactures from one colony to another forbidden ; 1 all 
iron manufactures 2 were suppressed in 1 7 5 ; even colonial 
hatters were not allowed to send hats from one colony into 
another. 3 In fact, so far was this principle carried, that 
Lord Chatham did not hesitate to declare in Parliament 
that " the British colonists of North America had no right 
to manufacture even a nail for a horse-shoe." 4 With 
aggravating restrictions of this character, it was almost 
certain that sooner or later ill-feeling would arise among 
the colonists ; and, as a matter of fact, long before the War 
of Independence, this ill-feeling was gaining ground ; so 
that the special circumstances which led to the war were only 
the secondary causes of a movement which was, from the 
nature of the case, inevitable. 

§ 213. Attempts to raise a Revenue from America. 

Had it not been for the ill-feeling thus caused, cir- 
cumstances had become, after the defeat of France in the 
Seven Years' War, very favourable for the building up in 
America of a colonial empire as rich as that of India, but 
whose population, unlike that of the East, should consist 
almost entirely of English settlers. This pleasant vision, 
however, was never to be realised. The time of separation 
was approaching. It probably would have come in any 
case, owing to the mistaken policy of the home Government 
in regard to colonial trade, but the immediate cause was the 
attempt made to raise a revenue from the colonies without 
first gaining their assent thereto, and without allowing them 
representation at home. The revenue was needed in order 
to pay for the expenses of the Seven Years' War, in which 
conflict it cannot be denied that the colonists had received 
substantial help from their mother country, and had gained 
substantial benefits. Therefore it did not seem unfair that 
they should be asked to contribute towards lightening a 

1 Bancroft, History of the United States, ii. 284, iii. 478, 566. 
2 2Z>., ii. 521, iii. 42. 

3 Of. the 5 George II., c. 22 ; Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 81, 
* Edwards, West Indies, Vol. II. p. 566, 



368 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

burden which had to some extent been incurred on their 
behalf. Nor, indeed, was the request in itself altogether 
unreasonable, but the colonists resented the manner in 
which it was made, and refused to assent to the principle of 
taxation without representation. The history of the struggle 
that followed is too well-known to need further repetition. 1 
It began with the Stamp Act of 1765, which laid a tax 
upon the stamps required for legal purposes. 2 This suc- 
ceeded in irritating the colonists to such an extent that they 
refused to have any commercial intercourse with the mother 
country, and so powerful was their opposition that it pro- 
duced a considerable decline in the colonial trade with Eng- 
land, and English manufacturers themselves requested that 
the Act might be repealed. 3 This was done in 1 776, but 
the next year the " six duties " were imposed 4 on the ground 
that it was " expedient that a revenue should be raised in 
His Majesty's dominions in America." But the opposition 
of the colonists was so great that it was found impossible to 
collect the duties, and they were therefore all repealed 
except that on tea, though a preamble to the Act regarding 
the tea duty still asserted the right of the home Govern- 
ment to tax its colonies. 5 

§ 214. Outbreak of War. 

Then came the refusal of the citizens of Boston to pay 
even this tax, and their well-known feat of throwing a cargo 
of tea 6 from the ship that brought it into their harbour 
(177 3). Lord North, the chief minister of George III. at 
that time, tried to punish the Bostonians by declaring their 
port closed, and by annulling the charter of Massachussets, 
their colony. 7 Thus matters went from bad to worse, until, 
in 1775, all trade with the colonies was forbidden, and the 

1 Cf. Lecky, History of the Eighteenth Century, Vol. III. ch. xii., IV. 
ch. xiv. and xv., and, of course, Bancroft's History of the United States. 

2 Cf. Craik, British Commerce, iii. 28, and Lecky, u. s. 

3 Craik, iii. 30, 31. 

4 So called because they were imposed upon six articles, including glass, 
tea, paper, red and white lead, painters' colours, and pasteboard. They 
were estimated to produce about £40,000, for the purpose of paying colonial 
judges and governors. Craik, iii. 32 ; Lecky, History, iii. 353. 

5 Lecky, History, iii. 365. G lb., iii. 387. 7 lb., iii. 397. 



WAR, POLITICS, AND INDUSTRY 369 

rupture with the mother country was completed by the 
Declaration of Independence on July 4 th, 1776. England 
tried to enforce obedience by military power, but the royal 
troops were stoutly resisted, and though the fortunes of war 
frequently varied, and the colonists w T ere often defeated, the 
result was that they achieved their independence. 1 It 
should be noted that Spain and France took the opportunity 
of paying off their ancient grudge against England by help- 
ing her colonists against her, chiefly by means of their 
navies. 2 And it should also be noticed that, in spite of 
every difficulty, England only just failed to retain her hold 
upon the colonies, and that if the French had not interfered 
it is very possible that the colonists would never have suc- 
ceeded in becoming independent, at any rate not till many 
years later than they actually did. As it was, however, we 
lost the opportunity of founding a really great colonial 
empire, and alienated the sympathies of a large number of 
our fellow-countrymen. Nevertheless, as has been pointed 
out, 3 there were great compensations for our loss. As the 
new nation prospered, our trade with it increased ; and as 
American agriculture developed, the demand for our manu- 
factures in the United States market became greater also ; 
while in the East we were at this time obtaining several 
new markets hitherto monopolised by Holland. Certainly, 
from a commercial point of view, the war did our trade 
very little harm, for soon after it ended we notice a con- 
siderable increase in the imports and exports to and from 
the colonies. 4 But yet no amount of argument about com- 
pensation in trade and elsewhere can do away with the fact 

1 Apart from Bancroft's great History of the United States, few books 
are more instructive upon the state of feeling in England and America 
respectively than Thackeray's novel, The Virginians. 

2 Cf. Lecky, History, iv. p. 38. The patriotism of the colonies in thus 
accepting foreign help after all that England had done for them is an 
instructive comment upon the supposed bond of sentimental loyalty 
about which some people talk even now. But the nonsense of sentiment 
in regard to our colonies is equalled by the bad taste of colonials, who 
vapour about cutting themselves loose from the old country ; cf. also 
Rogers, Econ. Interpretation, p. 332. 

3 Caldecott, English Colonisation and Empire, p. 57. 

4 Cf. Craik, Hist. Brit. Comm., iii. 102. 

2 A 



370 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

that England in many ways has suffered a permanent loss 
from the revolt of the American colonies, and that even for 
the United States their emancipation has not been an 
unmixed advantage. 

§ 215. The Great Continental War. 

But although the War of Independence cost us a great 
deal, it did not seriously affect the development of our 
home industries. The Industrial Revolution went steadily 
on, and for just thirty years (1763-93) the country, though 
not entirely at peace, was yet sufficiently undisturbed to 
make rapid progress in the new manufacturing methods. 
But in 1789 the French Revolution broke out, and for 
over twenty years Europe was plunged into a disastrous 
and exhausting conflict. At the first outbreak of the 
Revolution, England looked on quietly. 1 Many men were 
openly glad that the down-trodden masses of the FreDch 
nation had overthrown the tyranny of an upper class, whose 
only idea of their duty in life had been to extort the last farth- 
ing from those below them, in order to spend it in irrespon- 
sible debauchery. Statesmen like Fox gloried in it ; 2 the 
younger Pitt was anxious not to interfere. 3 But Pitt was 
forced to act both by capitalists and merchants, who now 
were equal with the landowners as the two ruling powers 
of England, and by the landed aristocracy as well. He 
himself, no doubt, saw that the conquests which the new 
French Republic was already beginning to make might help 
France to secure again her old position as the most formid- 
able rival of English commerce. 4 If now this rival could 
be finally struck down, England was sure of the control of 
the world's markets. Such, at least, if not his own motives, 

1 Lecky, History of the Eighteenth Century, v. p. 445. 

2 lb., p. 453, and cf pp. 454 to 475. 

3 lb., pp. 558, 560, and vi. 60. 

4 A hint of English feeling at first that France would suffer a temporary 
eclipse by the Revolution is given in Lecky, v. 443. But soon the power 
of the Revolution was to be feared. On the other hand, Napoleon saw 
equally clearly that France's most serious and persistent rival was Eng- 
land, who was the prime mover of all coalitions against France ; cf. Corre- 
spondence de Napoleon L, Vol. III. 518-520, and Hausser, Franzosische 
Revolution, pp. 563-565. 



WAR, POLITICS, AND INDUSTRY 371 

were the considerations that must have been urged upon 
him by the mercantile party in England. But apart from 
these commercial interests, the whole body of English 
constitutional sentiment was arrayed against the excesses 
of the French Revolutionaries. The aristocracy, the Church, 
the middle classes, and, in fact, everybody except a few 
ardent Republicans, were horrified at the brutalities of the 
Paris mob. Those brutalities were, indeed, worthy of all 
execration, and yet an excuse may be found for them in the 
centuries of legalised oppression, rapine, and insult under 
which the French proletariate had groaned. In England, 
however, as elsewhere, the excuses which history can make 
were, if not unknown, at least neither comprehended nor 
admitted ; though it is somewhat to the credit of the nation 
that even then the declaration of war came from France 
and not from England. 1 The immediate cause of a war 
that was certain to have come sooner or later, was the 
French invasion of Holland, and after this England was 
plunged headlong into the great European struggle of 
Monarchy against Republicanism. Pitt had in this the 
support of all classes at home. The merchants and manu- 
facturers were only too glad to see their old rival ruined ; 
the landowners and nobility were, of course, indignant at 
seeing the " lower classes," even of a foreign nation, rise 
against their lords, even though their lords perhaps deserved 
their punishment. But there can be no doubt that the 
majority of the English people also believed that England 
was fighting for the great principles of Monarchy and 
Religion, exemplified, unfortunately, by a foolish king 
and a corrupted priesthood. The policy of the English 
Government was certainly approved by the majority 
of the nation. But the minority, who sympathised with 
the Revolution, included a certain number of the work- 
ing classes and others, among whom, especially after the 
country had felt the first severity of the burdens imposed 
by the war, a spirit of discontent 2 manifested itself. These 

1 Lecky, History, vi. 131, 132. 

2 Gf. Lecky, History of the Eighteenth Century, v. 448, and Green, History 
of the English People, iv. 314. 



372 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

manifestations, feeble and somewhat foolish as they were, 
caused a veritable panic in the country. The Habeas 
Corpus Act was suspended, and all opposition silenced in 
imprisonment. 1 In the war, Pitt was indomitable till his 
death (in 1805), inspiring and subsidising 2 coalitions 
against France, or guiding England unflinchingly when she 
had to fight single-handed against the world. At times, 
as in 1796, Britain was threatened with invasion by the 
French, and the Irish, or, rather, a certain section of them, 
assisted 3 her would-be invaders. At another time (1806), 
English industry was threatened with ruin by Napoleon's 
Berlin and Milan Decrees, forbidding Continental nations 
to trade with us. 4 But at last the great inspiring genius 
of England's enemies was defeated, and the long years of 
war came to a close in 1815. 

§ 216. Its Effects upon Industry and the Working 
Classes. 

When peace came at length it found the resources of 
the nation sorely tried, but not yet exhausted. All classes 
had suffered somewhat, but the working classes worst of 
all. Yet the French Revolution, and the consequent wars, 
had not retarded to a very great extent the development of 
our industries, though the contest repaired a large portion 
of the wealth produced by the new industrial system to pay 
for it. 5 But in one thing we had had a great advantage 
over Continental nations, for our island was the only country 
in which war was not actually going on, and hence our 
manufactures were undisturbed. Consequently England 
was by no means so exhausted as the other participants in 
the struggle, and she had, moreover, the ocean-carrying 

1 Green, History, iv. 315. 

2 Rogers, Economic Interpretation, p. 201, remarks that Pitt " hired the 
European monarchs in succession, and made very unsuccessful bargains." 
Elsewhere he is very severe on Pitt (p. 470) for "plunging the country" 
into this twenty-two years' war. This is not quite fair to Pitt, who seems 
rather to have tried to avoid war. 

3 Cf. Lecky, History, VII. chs. xxvii. and xxviii. 

4 Cf. my British Commerce, pp. 94, 95 ; Commerce in Europe, p. 177 ; 
and Craik, History of British Commerce, iii. 192, 193. 

5 Cf. Lecky, History, vi. 218 ; Porter, Progress of the Nation, i. 188. 



WAR, POLITICS, AND INDUSTRY 373 

trade left secure to her by our undisputed naval supremacy. 1 
But yet her finances had been strained to an enormous 
extent, and before concluding this hasty sketch of the great 
period of the Continental War, we ought to mention the 
financial difficulties into which, in spite of commercial 
prosperity, it plunged our country. None but a rich State 
could ever have stood the terrible effects of this war as 
well as England bore them at this time ; but even as it 
was the strain was tremendous. The war actually cost 
from first to last no less than £831,446,449, and more 
than £600,000,000 were added to the National Debt. 2 
William Pitt, who was then Prime Minister, tried every 
means of raising money, not only by increasing duties on 
almost every article that could be taxed, 3 but also by a 
system of loans. The duties were placed upon spirits, 
plate, brick, stones, glass, wine, tea, coffee, fruit, hats, 
horses, and dogs ; and these were followed by a heavy 
income tax, 4 till very soon there were very few articles of 
any description that were left untaxed. Loans were also 
raised by the Government upon a system which has since 
proved very disadvantageous to the country at large, 5 because 
such easy terms were given to the lenders that practically 
very little more than 65 per cent, was received for every 

1 Early in the war she gained the mastery of the sea and became the 
workshop of Europe ; Rogers, Economic Interpretation, p. 292. 

2 At this period (1793) the revenue from taxation only was £19,845,705, 
and the expenditure £24,197,070. In 1815 the revenue was £72,210,512, 
and the expenditure £92,280,180. At the beginning of the war with 
Russia in 1855 the National Debt was £805,411,690; in 1882 it had been 
reduced to £754,455,270 ; and in 1890 to £689,944,027, the annual interest 
and annuities on which amount to some £25,000,000. Cf. W. Hewins' 
article in the Co-operative Annual, 1889. On the Debt generally, see 
Leone Levi, History of British Commerce, Pt. II., ch. iii. 

3 Rogers, who criticises Pitt's finance very severely, remarks that his 
taxes were the worst conceivable, because they were nearly all on con- 
sumption, trade, and manufactures ; Economic Interpretation, p. 470. But 
allowance must be made for the desperate circumstances of the case ; cf. 
Leone Levi, History of British Commerce, p. 98. 

4 It was 10 per cent, on incomes of £200 and over ; Rogers, Economic 
Interpretation, p. 474; and cf. Levi, History of British Commerce, 
p. 99. 

5 Cf. Lecky's criticism of Pitt's finance, History, v. 53 ; also Leone Levi, 
History of British Commerce, p. 98 (Pt. II., ch. iii.), and p. 102. 



374 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

£100 nominally subscribed. 1 Thus between 1793 and 
1801 no less than eighteen different loans were raised by 
Pitt, but for the nominal capital of £314,000,000 that 
were funded as national debt only £202,000,000 were 
really received in cash. 2 Heavy subsidies, amounting to 
some £57,000,000, were also given to our continental 
allies, chiefly Prussia and Austria. No less than £5,000,000 
were sent to German states alone in 1796. 3 The awful 
strain upon the resources of the country naturally led to 
severe commercial crises, and even the Bank of England 
was directed by the Government to suspend cash payments 4 
of its notes (26th February, 1797). These notes, which now 
could not be turned into cash, were nevertheless accepted 
loyally by all the principal merchants, 6 and, following their 
example, by all classes of the community ; and for more 
than twenty years the bank was not permitted to cash its 
own notes. 6 Such was the crisis through which the com- 
merce of the country had to pass, and that it passed 
through it successfully says much for English energy and 
perseverance. But if it had not been that the Industrial 
Revolution, and the inventions which caused it, had come, 
as it were, just in time to increase our national wealth, it 
is very doubtful whether the nation could have passed 
as successfully as it did through an ordeal so severe as 
this. 

But the working classes had suffered the most, in spite 
of the fact that our manufactures prospered and exports 
increased all through the war. In 1793 the exports were 
officially valued at over £17,000,000 ; for every year after- 
wards they were at least £22,000,000, often more; in 
1800 over £34,000,000, and in 1 815 they had quite doubled 

1 On some occasions the loan was even issued below £50 per cent ; 
Rogers, Economic Interpretation, p. 452. 

2 Leone Levi, History of British Commerce, p. 101. 

3 For exact amounts of foreign loans and subsidies, 1793-1814, see Porter, 
Progress of the Nation, ii. 335. 

4 Craik, History of British Commerce, iii. 158-164 ; and Levi, History of 
British Commerce, Pt. II. , ch. i. p. 75. 

5 Craik, History of British Commerce, iii. 163. 

6 For the resumption of cash payments in 1819, see Levi, British Com- 
merce, pp. 141, 142 (Pt. II., ch. vi.). 



WAR, POLITICS, AND INDUSTRY 375 

their value at the beginning of the war, being then over 
£58,000,000 (official value). 1 But most of the profits 
of trade went into the hands of the capitalist manufac- 
turers, while taxation fell with special severity upon the 
poor, since taxes were placed on every necessity and con- 
venience of daily life. Even as late as 1842 there were 
over a thousand articles in the customs tariff. 2 The price 
of wheat, moreover, rose to famine height ; from 49s. 3d. 
per quarter in 1793 to 69s. in 1799, to 113s. lOd. in 
1800, and 106s. in 1810. 3 At the same time wages were 
rapidly falling, 4 and thus the burdens of the war fell most 
severely upon those least able to pay for them. But the 
poverty of the poor was the wealth of the landowners, who 
kept on raising rents continually, 5 and grew rich upon the 
starvation of the people ; for they persuaded Parliament to 
prohibit the importation of foreign corn except at famine 
prices, 6 and avoided, as far as possible, even during the 
Continental War, the necessary burdens of taxation. 7 It 
was owing to their influence that Pitt raised fresh funds 
from taxes on articles of trade, manufacture, and general 
consumption. 8 The result was seen in the deepening dis- 
tress of the industrial classes, and in 1816 riots broke out 
everywhere 9 — in Kent among the agricultural labourers, in 
the Midlands among the miners, and at Nottingham among 
the artisans, who wreaked their vengeance upon the new 
machines which they thought had stolen their bread. But 
the theft must rather be laid to the charge of those who did 
not allow them to participate in the wealth they had helped 
to create. 

1 Levi, u. s., Appendix, pp. 491, 492. 

2 Levi, History of British Commerce, p. 269. 

3 Leone Levi, British Commerce, p. 85 (Pt. II., ch. ii.), and p. 145, note. 

4 For further details as to condition of the working classes, cf. Rogers, 
Six Centuries, p. 505 ; and Levi, History of British Commerce, pp. 145, 
146. 

5 Porter, Progress of the Nation, i. p. 188. 

6 Below, pp. 434, 435. 

7 Rogers, Economic Interpretation, pp. 471, 473, 474. 

8 lb., p. 470. 

9 Annual Register, 58 ; Levi, History of British Commerce, p. 146, 



37$ INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

§ 217. Politics among the Working Classes. 

Such were the economic effects of the period of industrial 
change and foreign war upon English society — the enrich- 
ment of the capitalists and landowners on the one hand, 
but the pauperising of the working classes on the other. 
So dire was the distress of the workmen that they felt some- 
thing must be done to make their voice heard effectively in 
the government of the people. They had tried violence, 
and that had been put down with a strong hand. Wiser 
counsels prevailed. William Cobbett, 1 in his Weekly 
Political Register (1803 to 1835), and those who thought 
like him, taught them to believe that a reform of Parlia- 
ment would cure their evils by giving them some share in 
the making of the laws which affected their lives and 
actions. The influences of the French Revolution and the 
Industrial Revolution also combined to arouse an active 
political feeling amongst them ; for the former excited a 
sympathetic feeling of revolt against unjust oppression, 
from what source soever it might come, while the latter 
brought home to them in their daily lives the new and 
sharp distinctions between the capitalist autocrat and his 
hundreds of workpeople bound to him only by a cash 
nexus, 2 who as yet were powerless to resist his endeavours 
to keep down their wages — powerless because the influence 
of class interests in legislation 3 had despotically forbidden 
workmen to combine in unions in their own interests. 
Indistinctly, but none the less keenly, the working classes 
began to feel that they too must be consulted in the councils 
of the nation, and as a preliminary step must gain an influ- 
ence over political events. But their early endeavours, 
which were attended by foolish rioting, were sharply and 
severely repressed, and the legislation following on the 
Manchester Massacre of 1819, in the shape of the drastic 

1 For this active reformer (b. 1762, d. 1835), see his Life, by Edward 
Smith (1878), and his own works {cf list at end of his memoir in Diction- 
ary of National Biography). 

2 Cf Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, pp. 93, 191. 

3 I.e., the Combination Laws, and chiefly the 40 Geo. III., c. 60 (1800), 
which prohibited all combinations for obtaining an advance in wages or 
lessening the hours of work, 



WAR, POLITICS, AND INDUSTRY 37; 

Six Acts, crushed them for a time. 1 Still we see irj these 
first rude arid abortive efforts of the working classes the be- 
ginnings of a definite political policy, which found expression 
later on in the help given by the masses to the agitation 
for the Reform Bill of 1832, and still later to the Corn 
Laws and the Chartist Movement. The results of the Reform 
Bill, which in its immediate effects seemed only to benefit 
the middle classes, were very disappointing to working-class 
politicians, 2 but there was nevertheless among them that 
deep-seated belief in the ultimate effect of political agitation 
which has seen its justification, after many years, in the 
attention now (1895) paid by rival parties in the State to 
the requirements, or supposed requirements, of the British 
workman. But it was the two great Revolutions of a 
hundred years ago in home industry and foreign politics 
which first roused the political feelings of the masses, by 

1 This so-called "Massacre" (a term which in this case is grossly mis- 
applied) was only one of a series of riots, originating in a desire for political 
reform, that occurred in various parts of England. In 1816 there were 
riots in the agricultural districts of the East of England, and in December 
of that year others at Spa Fields. In March 1817 the " Blanketeers " 
caused disturbances at Manchester, and in June there were risings in 
Derbyshire also. In 1819 there were riots among the working-classes in 
many places to petition for reform, and proclamations were issued against 
seditious meetings. The Manchester riot occurred on August 16th, 1819, 
when the mob was attacked by the yeomanry and one or two persons killed. 

The " Six Acts " were passed in consequence of these troubles, and may 
be briefly summarised as follows : — 

(1) Nov. 29 — Introduced by the Lord Chancellor: An Act to prevent 
delay in the administration of justice in cases of misdemeanour. (2) Intro- 
duced by Lord Sidmouth : An Act to prevent the training of persons to 
the use of arms and the practice of military evolutions and exercise. (3) 
An Act for the more effectual prevention and punishment of blasphemous 
and seditious libels. (4) An Act to authorise justices of the peace in cer- 
tain disturbed counties to seize and detain arms collected and kept for 
purposes dangerous to the public peace, and to continue in force till March 
25, 1822. (5) Introduced by Lord Castlereagh : An Act to subject certain 
publications to the duties of stamps on newspapers, and to make other 
regulations for restraining the abuses arising from the publication of 
blasphemous and seditious libels. (6) Introduced by Lord Sidmouth in 
the Lords and (on Nov. 29) by Lord Castlereagh in the Commons : An Act 
for more effectually preventing seditious meetings and assemblies out of 
doors, to continue in force for five years {of. Acland and Ransome's English 
Political History, p. 170). 

2 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 207. 



378 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

J the misery which the War with Republican France inflicted 
upon them, and by the new industrial conditions already 
brought into play by the introduction of machinery and 
accentuated by the effects of that war. A time of industrial 
transition is nearly always severe and painful to those who 
have to go through it ; but the pain and misery of the 
great transition in English industry, both manufacturing and 
agricultural, was increased tenfold by the terrible foreign 
conflict into which England was inevitably plunged. That 
transition period, however, brought home to the working 
classes, miserable and degraded as they then were, the 
necessity of some political reform that would give them a 
voice in the management of their own affairs. They were 
far too weak then to gain a hearing in Parliament, but as 
time went on and their power increased, their voice has 
been heard more and more clearly in English politics. 

§ 218. Political Results of the Industrial Revolution. 

Now it is noticeable that the Industrial Revolution, 
which caused so much misery to the working classes at 
first, gave them in the end much of their present political 
power by the very nature of its economic conditions. The 
use of machinery worked by steam power necessitated the 
concentration of workers into factories, where this power 
could easily be supplied to a set of machines ; and since 
factories, again, to obtain steam power, must be situated 
near a convenient supply of coal, it resulted that the 
population working in manufactures was compelled to 
concentrate itself on the great coal-fields. To this migra- 
tion of the population to the coal districts of the North and 
North-west we have already alluded, and it only remains to 
point out here how the growth of great manufacturing 
towns, resulting from this process, created immediately the 
4 political question, as to the proper representation of such 
large masses of people in Parliament. The system then in 
vogue has been described so frequently that it is un- 
necessary to say more about it, except, perhaps, to point out 
the great length of time it took to overcome the influence 
of the opposition to reform. One may note, also, the class 



WAR, POLITICS, AND INDUSTRY 379 

jealousy of the great landed proprietors of the House of 
Lords against the new manufacturing population that was 
demanding admittance into the councils of the nation. 
The jealousy was instinctive, and no doubt well founded, 
but it has been repaid by the attempts, in later years, 
to abolish the House which so adequately represents the 
landed interest. But, however naturally jealous the 
landed interest may have been, it was palpably absurb to 
refuse to transfer the franchise of Penryn to the huge 
town of Manchester, or that of East Retford to Birmingham, 1 
as was the case in 1828, and such exhibitions of opposition 
to the inevitable could only arouse the scorn, if not the 
anger, of the masses of the people. But the Reform Bill 
was passed at last, and the manufacturing population of the 
towns gained the first step in their progress towards 
political influence. It was, however, only a step, and 
many more had to be taken before they could be said to be 
adequately represented in the life of the nation. But the 
history of their progress towards the franchise is a matter 
for the political historian ; the economist need only notice 
that the coal mine and the spinning jenny revolutionised 
the face of English politics as effectually as the guillotine 
changed the course of the politics of France. Of course 
the blood-stained political fireworks of the French Revolu- 
tion have attracted a larger share of the attention of the 
ordinary historian, even in England, than has ever been 
given to the less obvious action of industrial forces, but it 
is often the case that historians perceive nothing but the 
obvious. Even in dealing with the French Revolution 
itself, that favourite theme for those who strive after the 
dramatic and picturesque, but are ignorant of all but the 
most elementary methods of historical drama or depiction, 
the great industrial and economic features of the time are 
hopelessly neglected, while page after page is devoted to the 
pretentious vapourings of the second-rate philosophers and 
pamphleteers of whose works the average Frenchman of 
the Revolution was profoundly ignorant. It is the weak- 
ness of literary men to believe that literature is the main 

1 Acland and Ransome's Political History, p. 175. 



380 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

thing in life, and that a pamphlet can change the destiny 
of a nation. But it is the men who act, and not those 
who merely talk or write, who bring about great national 
changes ; and while philosophers were prattling and 
politicians were orating, the men of action were fighting 
for the freedom and supremacy of England abroad, or 
quietly developing her magnificent industrial resources at 
home. Amid foreign war and political disturbance the 
miner and the weaver were shaping and changing the 
future course of the nation. When peace was restored, 
England had definitely become the workshop of the world, 
and her industry had definitely completed its transition 
from the domestic to the factory system. Of this system, 
with its enormous advantages, but also enormous evils, we 
must now speak. 



CHAPTER XXII r 

THE FACTORY SYSTEM AND ITS RESULTS 

§ 219. The Results of the Introduction of the Factory 
System. 

The great war which has just been mentioned in the preced- 
ing chapter found England at its beginning a nation whose 
mainstay was agriculture, w r ith manufactures increasing, it 
is true, but still only of secondary importance. At the 
commencement of the war English workers spun and wove 
in their cottages ; at its close they were herded together in 
factories, and were the servants of machinery. The manu- 
facturing population was rapidly increasing and the agricul- 
tural steadily declining. 1 The capitalist element had become 
the main feature in production, and the capitalist manufac- 
turers the main figures in English industry, rivalling and 
often overtopping the landed gentry. But a man cannot 
become a capitalist without capital, and capital cannot be 
accumulated without labour, though these remarkably 
obvious facts are constantly forgotten. The large capitalists 
of earlier manufacturing days obtained their capital, after 
the first small beginnings, from the wealth produced by 
their workmen, and from their own acuteness in availing 
themselves of new inventions. Of the wealth produced by 
their workmen they took nearly the whole, often leaving 
their employes only enough to live upon while producing 
more wealth for their masters. Hence it may be said that 
capital was in this case the result of abstinence, though the 
abstinence was on the part of the workman and not of his 
employer, as we shall shortly see. 

This, then, was the immediate result of the factory 
system : the growth of large accumulations of capital in the 
hands of the new master-manufacturers, who, with their 

1 Cf> Porter, Progress of the Nation, i. p. 52. 

381 



382 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

new machinery, undisturbed by internal war, were able to 
supply the nations of Europe with clothing at a time when 
these nations were far too much occupied in internecine 
conflicts on their own soil to produce food and clothing for 
themselves. Even Napoleon, in spite of all his edicts 
directed against English trade, was fain to clothe his soldiers 
in Yorkshire stuffs when he led them to Moscow. 1 It was 
no wonder that the growth of capital was rapid and enor- 
mous. Other results followed. The formerly widespread 
cottage industry was now aggregated into a few districts, 
nearly all in Lancashire and Yorkshire, for the sake of the 
coal which was there so readily available. Not only that, 
but the workpeople themselves were more closely concen- 
trated in the conditions of their work than they had been 
before. The factory had become the dominant feature in 
industry, and that for obvious reasons. For steam can only 
be generated in a fixed spot, and the motive power furnished 
thereby can only be distributed over a small area, and thus 
it became necessary to have all the workpeople close to- 
gether in one large building. That is the raison d'Stre of 
the factory system, but even if the necessity for concentra- 
tion could be obviated by the use of some other motive 
power, such as electricity, it is doubtful whether manufac- 
turers would alter their arrangements in this respect. For 
there are also, besides the question of the supply of power, 
various economies of administration and management, to 
say nothing of manufacture or purchase and sale, which 
make the system of working with a number of people 
together in factories exceedingly advantageous ; 2 and 
these considerations would continue to have weight even if 
some other motive power than steam were to be in future 
introduced. 

But factories have their disadvantages as well as their 
uses, and in the early days of the factory system these evils 
were painfully apparent, at any rate as far as they affected 
the comfort of the workers. Persons of all ages and both 

1 Rogers, Economic Interpretation, p. 292. 

2 Cf. L. L. Price on Domestic Industry in Palgrave's Dictionary of Politi- 
cal Economy. 



THE FACTORY SYSTEM 383 

sexes were collected together in huge buildings, under no 
moral control, with no arrangements for the preservation of 
health, comfort, or decency. 1 The enormous extension of 
trade rendered extra work necessary, and the mills ran all 
night long as well as by day. There was as yet no legisla- 
tion as to the hours or conditions of work. The machines 
made " to shorten labour " resulted in many cases in vastly 
extending it ; while in others again they took away all the 
means of livelihood from the old class of hand -workers with v 
terrible and surprising suddenness. 

§ 228. Machinery and Hand Labour. 

The substitution of machinery for hand labour progressed, 
however, with considerable irregularity. In some cases it 
took place very rapidly, and caused great distress ; in 
others it came more slowly and with less misery to the 
worker. In the hand wool-combing industry, machinery 
was introduced very slowly, and it was contended that a 
machine could never accomplish this branch of manufacture 
with the excellence achieved by manual effort. It was not 
till 1840 that the wool-combing machine seriously threat- 
ened the hand-comber, and even then many believed it 
would never supplant him. 2 But this was an exceptional 
case ; in most branches of manufacture machinery was 
introduced very quickly, and the workmen bitterly resented 
its introduction. It was useless for economists to point out 
the ultimate advantages it would confer upon labour ; the 
workman only saw that it threw him out of employment 
or lessened his wages. From his own point of view he 
was undoubtedly right. The advantages so praised by 
economists could not accrue to him immediately, and it 
was but a poor consolation to reflect that the next genera- 
tion would reap them, while his own pocket was empty 
and his cottage bare. Hence came that fierce, but natural, 
revolt against the new order of things, which found expres- 
sion in riots and outrage. The labourers sought to destroy 

1 Taylor, Modern Factory System, pp. 88 (immorality), 169 (insanitary 
conditions). 

2 Burnley, Wool and Woolcombing, p. 166. 



384 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

the new machinery ; and the struggle of what were called 
" the iron men/' against human beings of flesh and blood, 
long continued to be a source of controversy and complaint, 
more especially as the workmen saw that the profits x made 
by these iron men went almost entirely into the hands of 
their masters. In 1812 occurred the Luddite Riots, when 
much machinery was destroyed in Nottingham and the 
Midland counties; in 1816 they broke out again, and 
in 1826 there were riots in Lancashire to destroy the 
power looms. 2 Besides these there were numerous other 
acts of violence committed at various times in other parts 
of the country. But it is a remarkable fact that the 
greatest of the various riots that occurred at the beginning 
of this century had a political rather than industrial origin. 
The agitation for the Reform Bill produced far more violence 
than the introduction of machinery. The reasons for this 
are easily perceived; for machines were not introduced 
simultaneously in all trades, or in all parts of the country, 3 
and therefore the introduction of single machines here and 
there only affected a small portion of the working-classes at 
any given time ; whereas the political issues involved in the 
question of Reform were brought before the country as a 
whole, and at the same period, and affected everybody 
equally. Perhaps, also, the half-unconscious good sense, 
which has at various times been visible among the working 
classes, led them to perceive that in the end they would 
gain far more by the acquisition of political power than by 
the destruction of industrial improvements. 

This substitution of machinery for manual labour pro- 
ceeded, as has been noted in wool-combing, 4 with somewhat 
unequal steps. It occurred far more rapidly and more 
markedly in spinning than in weaving ; and, even in spin- 
ning, the cotton manufacture was affected sooner than the 
woollen. 5 In framework knitting the application of steam- 

1 Even Porter (in his Progress of the Nation, iii. 3) remarks how great is 
the "inequality in the division among the people of the produce of the 
national industry " ; though he tries to take the most favourable view of 
the case. 2 Gf Taylor, Modern Factory System, pp. 157-158. 

3 Gf above, p. 341, note. 4 Above, p. 383. 

5 Gf. generally, Taylor, Modern Factory System, pp. *31, 82. 



THE FACTORY SYSTEM 385 

power was long delayed by the great cheapness of labour in 
that trade, owing to which manufacturers were slow to 
adopt machinery worked by steam, since it seemed to 
them that they could not thereby make more profit than 
they did already. 1 On a general survey of the manufac- 
turers of the country, we may, in fact, say that machinery 
was used in all branches for spinning 2 by the earlier part of 
the century, but not for weaving, and it was not till 
between 1830 and 1840 that the use of weaving machines 
seriously threatened the hand-looms. 3 The factory system, 
however, had from the first an indirect influence over the 
weaver, because the new spinning machines supplied 
yarn so quickly that weavers no longer used the yarn 
spun by their wives and children, but bought it from the 
factories. Hence there was a tendency for them to collect 
round the new mills, 4 where yarn was so readily obtainable, 
although they did not actually work in them. 

§ 221. Loss of Rural Life and of Bye-Industries. 

Thus from the first there was that tendency towards con- 
centration of population which is so marked a feature of 
the Industrial Revolution. This implied also two other 
changes, both of the utmost importance to the working 
classes. In the first place their life lost that rural char- 
acter 5 which had distinguished the domestic system of 
industry when the weaver worked in his cottage in some 
village or country town, and varied his manufacturing work 
with rural occupations. Now he had to live close by the 
factory, where he and his family worked all day long amid 
iron machines and stone walls, and the garden and allot- 
ment were things of the past. The freedom and indepen- 
dence, too, of the old life were gone, and the sound of the 
factory bell and the rigidity of the factory hours now 
formed an unpleasant contrast, which the workers at first 

1 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 620. 

2 Reports, 1833, xx. 336. 

3 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 635 ; Taylor, Modern Factory 
System, p. 81. 

4 Reports, Miscellaneous, 1806, in. 577. 5 Above, p. 327. 

2 B 



386 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

greatly disliked. 1 Restraint and regularity were the features 
of the new system, and though they are undoubtedly con- 
ducive to increased work, they are not always relished by 
the workman. That is, however, perhaps only a minor 
point. The second great effect of the concentration of 
population under the factory system was the loss of bye- 
employments. We have seen already how important these 
were 2 in increasing wages ; but now they were quite cut 
off. Spinning had been practised by the female members 
of almost every household, whether the family was engaged 
in agriculture or manufactures ; but now the agriculturist 
could no longer find a buyer for his homespun yarn, and 
the weaver no longer used the produce of his wife's spinning 
wheel, but bought it from the factory. Conversely the 
manufacturing artisan no longer went out into the fields 
for a little harvest work or supplemented his earnings at 
the loom by the produce of his leisure time in his allotment. 
The artisan was now confined strictly to the factory, and 
the agriculturist strictly to the fields. 3 There was no over- 
lapping of employments ; the hum of the spinning-wheel 
grew silent in the cottage, and the weaver no longer breathed 
the fresh scents of hay and harvest in the country air. 
The village lost the artisan, and the artisan lost the village, 
while the workers both of country and of town lost a very 
real addition to their wages. Their earnings were now 
only what they actually brought home in money from the 
mill or farm, and the useful supplements which they had 
formerly been able to gain by other work no longer helped 
to fill the family purse. In more ways than one it was a 
very real loss, and as even money wages were decreasing, 4 
their lot under the new system could not seem to them 
particularly bright. It is not, therefore, surprising that 
men showed their discontent by resisting the introduction 
of new machines. 

1 At Ipswich especially, there was a great dislike to factory work ; 
Reports (1840), xxiii. 196. 

2 Above, pp. 328-330. 3 Of. also Taylor, Modern Factory System, p. 92. 
4 From 1811 to 1842 wages declined, it is said, about 35 per cent. ; cf. 

Reports, 1845, xv. 51 (Muggeridge's figures). See also Porter, Progress of 
the Nation, ii. 252, Tables, where spinners, weavers, and labourers show a 
marked decrease in wages. 



THE FACTORY SYSTEM 387 

§ 222. Contemporary Evidence of the New Order of 

Things. 
A very good idea of the effects of the introduction of the 
factory system upon the operatives may be formed from a re- 
solution unanimously adopted, after some riots similar to those 
referred to above, by the magistrates at the quarter sessions 
of Preston, in Lancashire, and dated November 11th, 1779, 
wherein it was resolved : " That the sole cause of great riots 
was the new machines employed in the cotton manufacture : 
that the county [i.e. the manufacturers] had greatly bene- 
fited by their erection, and that the destroying them in one 
county only led to their erection in another ; and that if a 
total stop were put by the legislature to their erection in 
Britain it would only tend to their establishment in foreign 
countries, to the detriment of the trade in Britain." l But 
better than the cold words of a formal resolution is the 
description of the country round Manchester, published in 
1795 by Dr Aikin. 2 He points out what we have already 
referred to, that " the sudden invention and improvement 
of machines to shorten labour have had a surprising influ- 
ence to extend our trade, and also to call in hands from all 
parts, particularly children for the cotton mills." He says 
that domestic life is seriously endangered by the extensive 
employment of women and girls in the mills, for they had 
become ignorant of all household duties. " The females 
are wholly uninstructed in knitting, sewing, and other 
domestic affairs requisite to make them frugal wives and 
mothers. This is a very great misfortune to them and to 
the public, as is sadly proved by a comparison of the 
labourers in husbandry, and those of manufacturers in 
general. In the former we meet with neatness, cleanliness, 
and comfort ; in the latter with filth, rags, and poverty." 
He also mentions the great prevalence of fevers among 
employes in cotton mills, consequent upon the utterly in- 
sanitary conditions under which they laboured. But 

1 Quoted in The History of the Factory Movement, i. 11, by "Alfred" 
(Samuel Kydd). 

2 The full title is A Description of the Country from 30 to 40 miles round 
Manchester. John Aikin, M.D. (1747-1822), was a brother of Mrs 
Barbauld. 



388 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

nowhere were the evils which accompanied the sudden 
growth of wealth and of industry so marked as in the case 
of those miserable beings who were brought to labour in 
the new mills under the apprentice system. Their life 
was literally and without exaggeration simply that of 
slaves. 

§ 223. English Slavery. The Apprentice System. 

When factories were first built there was a strong re- 
pugnance on the part of parents who had been accustomed 
to the old family life under the domestic system to send 
their children into these places. It was, in fact, considered 
a disgrace so to do : the epithet of " factory girl " was the 
most insulting that could be applied to a young woman, 
and girls who had once been in a factory could rarely find 
employment elsewhere. 1 Perhaps this was due to the 
shocking immorality (especially of the masters) in the early 
factories. 2 It was not until the wages of the workman had 
been reduced to a starvation level that they consented to 
their children and wives being employed in the mills. 
But the manufacturers wanted labour by some means 
or other, and they got it from the workhouses. They 
sent for parish apprentices from all parts of England, and 
pretended to apprentice them to the new employments just 
introduced. 3 The millowners systematically communicated 
with the overseers of the poor, who arranged a day for the 
inspection of pauper children. Those chosen by the manu- 
facturer were then conveyed by waggons or canal boats to 
their destination, 4 and from that moment were doomed to 
slavery. Sometimes regular traffickers would take the 
place of the manufacturer, and transfer a number of 
children to a factory district, and there keep them, gener- 
ally in some dark cellar, till they could hand them over to 
a millowner in want of hands, 6 who would come and 
examine their height, strength, and bodily capacities, 

1 History of the Factory Movement, i. 16. 

3 Of. Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England, ch. iv. 
3 The Heads of the Bill permitting this (1796) are given in the History of 
the Factory Movement, i. 4, 5. 
*/6.,i. 17. 5 /6., p. 17, 



THE FACTORY SYSTEM 389 

exactly as did the slave-dealers in the American markets. 
After that the children were simply at the mercy of their 
owners, nominally as apprentices, but in reality as mere 
slaves, who got no wages, and whom it was not worth while 
even to feed or clothe properly, because they were so cheap, 
and their places could be so easily supplied. It was often 
arranged by the parish authorities, in order to get rid of 
imbeciles, that one idiot should be taken by the millowner 
with every twenty sane children. 1 The fate of these un- 
happy idiots was even worse than that of the others. The 
secret of their final end has never been disclosed, but we 
can form some idea of their awful sufferings from the hard- 
ships of the other victims to capitalist greed and cruelty. 
Their treatment was most inhuman. The hours of their 
labour were limited only by exhaustion, after many modes 
of torture 2 had been unavailingly applied to force con- 
tinued work. Illness was no excuse : no child was 
accounted ill till it was positively impossible to force 
him or her to continue to labour, in spite of all the 
cruelty which the ingenuity of a tormentor could suggest. 3 
Children were often worked sixteen hours a day, by day and 
by night. 4 Even Sunday was used as a convenient time to 
clean the machinery. 5 The author of The History of the 
Factory Movement writes : " In stench, in heated rooms, 
amid the constant whirling of a thousand wheels, little 
fingers and little feet were kept in ceaseless action, forced 
into unnatural activity by blows from the heavy hands and 
feet of the merciless overlooker, and the infliction of bodily 
pain by instruments of punishment, invented by the sharp- 
ened ingenuity of insatiable selfishness." 6 They were fed 
upon the coarsest and cheapest food, often with the same as 
that served out to the pigs of their master. 7 They slept by 

1 History of the Factory Movement, i. pp. 17, 43. 

2 For ghastly examples see the Memoirs of Robert Blincoe, or, more con- 
veniently, Taylor, Modern Factory System, p. 192. 3 lb. 

4 Alfred, History of the Factory Movement, i. 21 ; and Taylor, Modem 
Factory System, p. 196. 

5 Alfred, i. 21. 

6 Alfred, History of the Factory Movement, i. 21, 22. 

7 Memoirs of Blincoe, quoted by Alfred, History of the Factory Movement, 
i. 23 ; also corroborated by other evidence, i. 25. 



390 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

turns and in relays, in filthy beds which were never cool ; 
for one set of children were sent to sleep in them as soon 
as the others had gone off to their daily or nightly toil. 
There was often no discrimination of sexes ; and disease, 
misery, and vice grew as in a hotbed of contagion. Some 
of these miserable beings tried to run away. To prevent 
their doing so, those suspected of this tendency had irons 
riveted on their ankles, with long links reaching up to the 
hips, and were compelled to work and sleep in these chains, 
young women and girls, 2 as well as boys, suffering this 
brutal treatment. Many died, and were buried secretly 
at night in some desolate spot, lest people should notice 
the number of the graves ; and many committed suicide. 3 
The catalogue of cruelty and misery is too long to recite 
here ; it may be read in the Memoirs of Robert Blincoe* 
himself an apprentice, or in the pages of the Blue-books of 
the beginning of this century, in which even the methodical 
and dry language of official documents is startled into life 
by the misery it has to relate. It is perhaps not well for 
me to say more about the subject, for one dares not trust 
oneself to try and set down calmly all that might be told 
about this awful page in the history of industrial England. 
I need only remark, that during this period of unheeded 
and ghastly suffering in the mills of our native land, the 
British philanthropist was occupying himself with agitating 
for the relief of the woes of negro slaves in other countries. 
He, of course, succeeded in raising the usual amount of 
sentiment, and perhaps more than the usual amount of 
money, on behalf of an inferior and barbaric race, who have 
repaid him by relapsing into a contented indolence and a 
scarcely concealed savagery which have gone far to ruin our 

1 Cf. Alfred, History, i. 17 ; Taylor, Modern Factory System, p. 198 ; cf. 
also evidence of J. Paterson, overseer, Dundee, before the Sadler Com- 
mittee, 1832. 

2 Blincoe, quoted in Alfred's History of the Factory Movement, i. 23. 

3 lb. , i. 24, 25. No inquests were ever held. 

4 These first appeared in Vol. I. of a periodical called The Lion, pub- 
lished by Richard Carlile, 62 Fleet Street, London, but afterwards issued 
separately. I have seen a separate copy in the Manchester Free Library ; 
cf. also No. 21 of The Poor Man's Advocate (Manchester, June 9, 1832) ; 
there are copious extracts in Taylor and Alfred, u. s. 



THE FACTORY SYSTEM 391 

possessions in the West Indies. The spectacle of England 
buying the freedom of black slaves by riches drawn from 
the labour of her white ones, affords an interesting study 
for the cynical philosopher. 

All this time the friends of the negro were harrowing the 
feelings of the inhabitants of the country in which these 
daily and nightly cruelties were perpetrated with tales of 
the sufferings of the unfortunate black men. No notice 
was taken of the horrors going on under the very eyes of 
the agitators, till at length the miseries of the factories 
began to avenge themselves upon a callous population in 
the shape of malignant fevers, bred from the horribly 
insanitary conditions of the mills in which these wretched 
creatures worked. 

§ 224. The Beginning of the Factory Agitation. 

The state of things in factories where large numbers of 
apprentices were employed became, in fact, so bad that at 
last something had to be done. In 1802 an Act 1 was 
passed, by the influence of the first Sir Robert Peel, " for 
the preservation of the health and morals of apprentices and 
others employed in cotton and other mills." It is a signifi- 
cant fact that the immediate cause of this bill was the fear- 
ful spread through the factory districts of Manchester of 
epidemic disease, owing to the overwork, scanty food, 
wretched clothing, long hours, bad ventilation, and over- 
crowding in unhealthy dwellings of the workpeople, especi- 
ally the children. 2 The hours of work were ' reduced ' to 
only twelve per day. This Act, however, did not apply to 
children residing near the factory where they were employed, 
for they were supposed to be " under the supervision of 
their parents." The result was that, although the appren- 
tice system was discontinued, other children came to work 
in the mills, and were treated almost as brutally, 3 though for- 
tunately they were not entirely in the hands of their master. 
But the evils of this system of child labour were very great. 

1 Act 42 Geo. III., c. 73. 

2 Alfred, History of the Factory Movement, i. 27. 

. 3 lb., i. ch. iv., and pp. 53, 79, 183, 278-306, ii. 10. 



392 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

During the whole of the period of 1800 to 1820, and even 
to 1840, the results of their sufferings were seen in the 
early deaths of many of the children, and in the crippled 
and distorted forms of the majority of those who survived. 1 
On the women and grown-up girls the effects of long hours 
and wearisome work were equally disastrous. 2 A curious 
inversion of the proper order of things was seen in the 
domestic economy of the victims of this cheap labour system, 
for women and girls were superseding men in manufacturing 
labour, and, in consequence, their husbands had often to 
attend, in a shiftless, slovenly fashion, to those household 
duties which mothers and daughters hard at work in the 
factories were unable to fulfil. 3 Worse still, mothers and 
fathers in some cases lived upon the killing labour of their 
little children, by letting them out to hire to manufacturers, 
who found them cheaper than their parents. In fact there 
was, as one investigator expressed it, " a conspiracy insen- 
sibly formed between the masters and the parents to tax 
them with a degree of toil beyond their strength." 4 

§ 225. Efforts towards Factory Be form. 

Meantime, however, the Act of 1802 seems to have 
become, even as regards apprentices, a dead letter. White 
slaves could be bought and sold in England with as much 
impunity as in the West Indies, — in fact, with more, for 
by 1815, Wilberforce's wishes as regards trading in slaves 
had long since become law. The fact that such sales took 
place is attested by the debate in the Commons, on June 
6th, 1815, introduced by Sir Robert Peel, in which one 
speaker (Horner) described the sending away of children to 
distant parishes, and gave an instance in which, " with a 
bankrupt's effects, a gang of these children had been put 

1 Of. evidence quoted in Alfred, u. s., i. 190, 287, 260, ii. 9. 

2 Of. evidence in Alfred, u. s., i. 181, 300. 

3 Of. facts quoted by Engels, Condition of the Working Classes in 1844 
(English edition, 1892), pp. 144, 145. 

4 Assistant Commissioner Power, in the famous 1833 Report. Reports, 
1833, xx. 604 ; also, cf. Oastler's speech quoted in Alfred, History of the 
Factory Movement, i. 228, and Sadler's speech, p. 158. 



THE FACTORY SYSTEM 393 

up to sale, and advertised publicly as part of the property. 1 
A still more atrocious instance," he continued, " had been 
brought before the court of King's Bench two years ago, 
when a number of these boys, apprenticed by a parish in 
London to one manufacturer, had been transferred [i.e. 
sold] to another, and had been found by some benevolent 
persons in a state of absolute famine." 2 Facts like these, 
even though negroes were not concerned, could no longer 
be blinked, and at length, in 1816, a Select Committee of 
the House of Commons was appointed to take evidence 
upon the state of children employed in the manufactories 
of the United Kingdom. Terrible evidence of overwork was 
given before this Committee, 3 but the grasp of Mammon was 
cruel and relentless ; and now that social reformers were in 
earnest, the inevitable opposition of capitalistic greed rose 
up in all its power to block the path of humanity. The 
surest block was the barrier of delay. Further Com- 
missions were asked for by the opponents of factory reform ; 
the same kind of evidence as before was repeated in 1819 
before a Committee of the Lords ; 4 and when at last 
very shame demanded that something should be done, the 
ineffectual Act, 59 George III., c. 6' 6, was passed. 5 This 
Act, when originally introduced, was meant to apply to all 
factories, but it was afterwards limited only to cotton 
factories, so that it had only a very partial effect, and was 
even then frequently evaded. 6 And in any case the worsted 
and woollen mills were not even touched. 

§ 226. Richard Oastler. 

So things went on again as badly as ever for year after 
year, and manufacturers grew rich, while children and 

1 Quoted in Alfred's (Samuel Kydd) History of the Factory Movement, 
i. 43. 2 /6.,i. 43. 

3 For the nature of the evidence, cf History of the Factory Movement, 
Vol. I., eh. iv. 4 lb., i 77. 

5 R. W. Cooke-Taylor in The Factory System and the Factory Acts (1894) 
remarks, p. 61, "It was generally ignored or evaded." 

6 It provided (1) nine years to be limit of age for child employment. 
(2) Twelve hours' day for those under sixteen years. (3) Time to be 
allowed for meals. (4) Ceilings and walls to be washed with quicklime 
twice a year. 



394 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

young people of both sexes were beaten and overworked to 
make their profits ; and philanthropists riding home late 
at night from heated meetings, after discussing the wrongs 
of the black slaves, looked with cheerful and ignorant 
complacency at the great factory windows blazing with 
light, and accepted them as signs of prosperity, little 
heeding or little knowing the misery and cruelty that pre- 
vailed within their walls. It was, however, one of these 
friends of the negro, and one who had often had such a 
midnight ride, who was suddenly aroused to the fact that 
actual slavery in the most literal sense was going on in 
England while he was agitating for its abolition abroad. 
Richard Oastler 1 was the man whose eyes were thus opened, 
a Yorkshireman by birth, and one well acquainted with the 
industries of the busy West Riding. He was once in 1830 
staying at the house of a friend who lived at Horton Hall, 
near Bradford, and who was a large manufacturer. As Oastler 
was talking to him one night about his slavery reforms, his 
friend John Wood remarked to him : 2 " I wonder you 
have never turned your attention to the factory system." — 
" Why should IV replied the young abolitionist, " I have 
nothing to do with factories." — " Perhaps not," was the 
answer, "but you are very enthusiastic against slavery in 
the West Indies, and I assure you that there are cruelties 
daily practised in our mills on little children, which I am 
sure if you knew you would try to prevent." And then he 
went on to describe to his astonished hearer the horrors of 
the factories. Even in his own mill Wood confessed that 
little children were worked from six in the morning till 
seven at night, with a break of only forty minutes, while 
in many other mills no rest at all was allowed ; and that 
various cruel devices were employed to goad them on to 

1 He was born in 1789, and had succeeded his father as steward to Mr 
Thornhill on his Yorkshire estates, living at Fixby Hall, near Hudders- 
field. It is curious that no proper biography of him exists. In Palgrave's 
Dictionary of Political Economy, however, I have given a short summary 
of the main facts of his life ; cf. also Taylor's Biographia Leodiensis, pp. 
499-503 ; Hodder's Life of the Earl of Shaftesbury, i. 214-216, 304; ii. 189. 
211; iii. 249; and "Alfred's" History of the Factory Movement, passim. 
Oastler died in 1861. 

2 See the conversation in Alfred's History, i. 95-97. 



THE FACTORY SYSTEM 395 

renewed labour. They were fined, beaten with sticks and 
straps and whips ; and the girls were also often subjected 
to shocking indecencies. 1 

§ 227. Factory Agitation in Yorkshire. For and 
Against. 
Oastler, when once he saw what was going on about him 
in his own country, made no delay in entering upon a war- 
fare that was to last for many a weary year, and bring many 
a trial and disaster. The very next day 2 he wrote a long 
letter to the great Yorkshire daily paper, the Leeds Mercury, 
in which he took for his text the old, foolish, and utterly 
untrue statement, " It is the pride of Britain that a slave 
cannot exist on her soil," and proved very conclusively that 
slavery could and did exist in a most dreadful form. He 
pointed out that thousands of children, both male and 
female, from six to fourteen years of age, and chiefly girls, 
were compelled to labour thirteen to sixteen hours a day, 
under the lash of an overseer, in the mills of Bradford, 
Morpeth, Halifax, Huddersfleld, and many other northern 
towns. This sudden revelation of English slavery created a 
remarkable sensation, but, of course, called forth a very 
powerful opposition. The simplest thing was to deny the 
existence of any such evils, and denials accordingly became 
remarkably frequent. A keen newspaper correspondence 
arose, chiefly in the columns of the Leeds Mercury; and from 
this controversy Oastler emerged triumphant, with all his 
facts proved over and over again, while confirmation of his 
statements began to pour in from every part of Yorkshire. 
Before a month had passed, a meeting of the worsted 
spinners of Bradford was called by some of the principal 
firms in that town (November 22nd), in order to promote 
legislation on the subject, and a petition was drawn up to 
be forwarded to Parliament. A similar agitation now arose 
in Lancashire, and a bill was laid before the Commons by 
Lord Morpeth to reduce the hours of labour and raise the 
limit of age for work in mills. 3 Hope seemed to be dawn- 

1 See the conversation in Alfred's History, i. 96. 

2 Cf. The Leeds Mercury : Oastler's letter is dated September 29th, 1830. 

3 For all the above, see Alfred's History, i. 104-107. 



396 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

ing for the children of the factories, when suddenly the 
manufacturers of Halifax and district struck the first note 
of opposition in a counter petition. 1 They set forth the 
" unimpeachable character for humanity and kindness " 
possessed by manufacturers as a class ; the impossibility of 
making profits if hours were reduced ; the overpowering 
force of foreign competition (almost non-existent then as 
compared with to-day) ; the general hardships of a manu- 
facturer's lot, owing to taxation and other difficulties ; and 
finally, " the pernicious tendency of all legislative enact- 
ments upon trade and manufactures," or, in other words, 
the necessity of following the golden rule of laissez faire. 

I have quoted the arguments of this petition because 
they are in brief a summary of the arguments which were 
then employed, are now employed, and probably always 
will be employed against any interference between master 
and man. In this case the law had only been invoked to 
step in between master and child ; but that mattered little ; 
the "liberty of the subject" and "freedom of contract" 
were questions too sacred to be trifled with. It was indeed 
soon seen that these arguments of the millowners and their 
friends were by no means lacking in cogency, for the pro- 
posed legislation upon the working of factories was modified 
to such an extent as to make it almost useless, and, in any 
case, the measure was to be applied to cotton mills only. 2 
Oastler felt that the day was lost, and said as much in a 
public letter to the Leeds Intelligencer of October 20, 
1831, a letter which shows cruel disappointment of heart, 
indeed, but yet is as full as ever of fire and hope for the 
future. 3 Incidentally it is curious to note, from a passage 
in this letter, that the Factory Reformers of that day were 
accused of being opposed to the abolition of negro slavery, 
and were said to be getting up a factory agitation "in 
order to turn the attention of the nation away from West 
Indian slavery." 4 But in spite of calumny, prejudice, and 

1 Alfred, History, i. 109 sqq. 

2 So the 1 and 2 William IV., c. 39 ; and cf. Taylor, Factory System and 
Factory Acts, p. 63. 

3 See it almost in full in Alfred's History, i. 118. 
4/6., i. 119. 



THE FACTORY SYSTEM 397 

the savage opposition of vested interests, the words of 
Richard Oastler rang forth undauntedly to the working 
classes of Yorkshire : " Let no promises of support from 
any quarter sink you to inactivity. Consider that you 
must manage this cause yourselves. Collect information 
and publish facts. Let your politics be : Ten hours a day, 
and a time book." 1 

§ 228. Ten Hours Day and Mr Sadler. 

At this time Oastler was living at Fixby Hall, Hudders- 
field, and from his position as a Tory and a Churchman, as 
he describes himself, could not at first see his way to working 
actively among the mill hands, who were mostly " Radicals 
and Dissenters." But now he saw that no barriers of class, 
or creed, or politics could be allowed to interfere in this 
cause, and from henceforth decided to throw in his lot with 
the factory workers, come what might. He was assisted, 
from the political side, by men like J. Hobhouse and M. T. 
Sadler, both Members of Parliament, warmly attached to 
his cause, and it was decided that Sadler should lead the 
question in the House of Commons. It would be tedious to 
go through all the phases of the great Ten Hours' Agitation 
in and out of Parliament, 2 and therefore it must suffice to 
mention that Sadler at length introduced a Ten Hours' 
Bill into the Commons late in 1831, and moved its second 
reading in March 1832, in a speech 3 of eminent moderation 
and judgment. He pointed out the existence of child- 
slavery in England, and the causes of it, mainly in the 
poverty, but partly in the inducements to laziness, of the 
parents. Many parents were unable to get work them- 
selves, and thus were compelled to hire out their children 
to the brutalities and hardships of factory work. Some 
parents, demoralised by the old Poor Law, selfish and 
brutalised by custom, purchased idleness for themselves at 
the cost of their children's health and strength. In some 

1 Alfred's History, i. 122. 

2 See Alfred's History, i. 125 sqq. 

3 Cf. Taylor, Factory System and Factory Acts (1894), p. 64. The speech 
is given in full in Alfred's History, i. 151 sqq. 



398 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

districts, so great was the demand for children's labour, that 
an indispensable condition of marriage among the working 
classes was the certainty of offspring, 1 whose wages — begin- 
ning at six years old — might keep their inhuman fathers 
and mothers in idleness. Well might Sadler exclaim : 2 
" Our ancestors could not have supposed it possible — 
posterity will not believe it true — that a generation of 
Englishmen could exist, or had existed, that would work 
lisping infancy of a few summers old, regardless alike of its 
smiles or tears, and unmoved by its unresisting weakness, 
twelve, thirteen, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, and through 
the weary night also, till, in the dewy morn of existence, 
the bud of youth was faded and fell ere it was unfolded." 
But, to our eternal disgrace as a nation, that generation of 
Englishmen existed, and Mr Sadler told the House, detail 
by detail, of the evils and outrages of the whole abominable 
system. Excessive hours, low wages, immorality, ill-health, 
— all were enumerated, and then he continued : " Then, in 
order to keep them awake, to stimulate their exertions, 
means are made use of to which I shall now advert, as a 
last instance of the degradation to which this system has 
reduced the manufacturing operatives of this country. 
Children are beaten with thongs, prepared for the purpose. 
Yes, the females of this country, no matter whether children 
or grown up — and I hardly know which is the more dis- 
gusting outrage — are beaten, beaten in your free market of 
labour as you term it, like slaves. The poor wretch is 
flogged before its companions — flogged, I say, like a dog, 
by the tyrant overlooker. We speak with execration of the 
cartwhip of the West Indies, but let us see this night an 
equal feeling rise against the factory thong in England." 3 

§ 229. The Evidence of Facts. 

Of course, it is needless to say that such an equal feeling 

did not arise, not, that is, with anything like the cry of 

horror that arose over negro slavery. The hours of black 

slaves' labour in our colonies were at that very time carefully 

1 Alfred's History, i. 158. 2 lb., i. 161. 3 lb., i. 183* 



THE FACTORY SYSTEM 399 

limited by law x to nine per day for adults, and six for 
young persons and children, while night work was simply 
prohibited. But for white slaves no limit was to be fixed, 
nor was the arm of the law to interfere. Though Sadler's 
bill was read a second time, and was referred to a com- 
mittee, nothing much was done. But the evidence given 
before this committee at length produced some effect. 
Oastler's tactics of publishing the facts had now been taken 
up unwittingly by Parliament itself, and the facts given 
before Sadler's committee 2 were terrible enough to cause a 
shudder of shame to run through the country. Yet, after 
all, the shame was only felt by a minority ; the nation, as a 
whole, was not yet touched. And very soon Mr Sadler lost 
his seat 3 in the House of Commons, in the election after 
the great Reform Bill of 1832, and the factory hands were 
thus left without a Parliamentary advocate of auy influence. 
But now a new leader appeared in the person of Lord 
Ashley, afterwards Earl Shaftesbury, who undertook to 
bring forward once more the Ten Hours' Bill. Lord 
Ashley's life may be read elsewhere, 4 but we may pause to 
look, though only for a moment, at the revelations of 
slavery brought to light by the Sadler Committee. 5 

In the first place the Committee received the satisfactory 
assurance from one witness that the youngest age at which 
children were employed was never under five. 6 But from 
five years onwards it was the custom to employ them, from 
about five o'clock in the morning till as late as ten o'clock 
at night, 7 during the whole of which time they were on 
their feet, with a short interval for dinner. 8 The children 
were generally cruelly treated, so cruelly that they dare not, 
for their lives, be too late at their work in a morning. 9 
One witness stated that he had seen children, whose work 
it was to throw a bunch of ten or twelve cordings across 
their hand and take them off, one at a time, so weary as 

1 By the Orders in Council of November 2, 1831. 

2 Of. Taylor, Factory System and Factory Acts, p. 65. 3 lb., p. 65. 

4 See the excellent Life, in 3 vols., by Mr Hodder. 

5 See ch. xii. of Alfred's History, Vol. I. 

6 lb. i. 275. ^Ib. i. 276. 
8 lb. i. 277 (quotation from evidence). 9 lb. i. 278. 



400 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

not to know whether they were at work or not, and going 
through the mechanical actions without anything in their 
hands. 1 When they made mistakes in this state of fatigue 
they were severely beaten by the spinner whom they helped 
or by the overlooker. Several cases of deaths, through 
such beating and blows, were given in evidence. " The 
children were incapable of performing their day's labour 
well towards the end of the day ; their fate was to be 
awoke by being beaten, and to be kept awake by the same 
method." 2 "At a mill in Duntruin," continued the same 
man, who gave this evidence, 3 "they were kept on the 
premises by being locked up while at work, they were 
locked up in the bothies (sleeping-huts) at night ; they 
were guarded to their work and guarded back again. 
There was one bothy for the boys, but that did not hold 
them all, so there were some of them put into the other 
bothy along with the girls." Sometimes the elder children 
tried to escape from such miserable and degraded surround- 
ings. When caught, as they generally were, they were 
inhumanly flogged, or sent to gaol for breaking their 
contracts. 4 A case is given of a young woman who was 
thus put in prison for a year, " brought back after a twelve- 
month and worked for her meat ; and she had to pay the 
expenses that were incurred. So she worked two years for 
nothing, to indemnify her master for the loss of her time." 5 

§ 230. English Slavery. 

Here, again, is the story of a Huddersfield lad who was 
lame. 6 He lived a good mile from the mill, and it was 
painful for him to move, " so my brother and sister used, 
out of kindness, to take me under each arm, and run with 
me to the mill, and my legs dragged on the ground in con- 
sequence of the pain ; I could not walk, and if we were 
five minutes too late, the overlooker would take a strap and 
beat us till we were black and blue." The worst of it was 

1 Alfred's History, Vol. I. i. 278. 

2 Evidence of James Paterson, quoted ib. , i. 283. 

3 lb., i. 283, 284. 4 lb., i. 284. 5 lb., i. 284. 
6 Evidence of Joseph Habergam, ib., i. 286. 



THE FACTORY SYSTEM 401 

that the masters in many mills encouraged the overlookers 
in this kind of brutality. An eye-witness 1 relates : " I have 
seen them, when the master has been standing at one end 
of the room with the overlookers speaking to him, and he 
has said ' look at those two girls talking,' and has run and 
beat them the same as they beat soldiers in the barrack- 
yard for deserting." A. Leeds girl, 2 who began her mill- 
work at six years old, and toiled then from five in the 
morning till nine at night, gives similar evidence : " When 
the doffers flagged a little or were too late, they were 
strapped, and those who were last in doffing were constantly 
strapped, girls as well as boys. I have been strapped 
severely, and have been hurt by the strap excessively. 
Sometimes the overlooker got a chain and chained the 
girls, and strapped them all down the room. The girls 
have many times had black marks upon their skin." 3 This 
was in a Yorkshire factory, and not upon a West Indian 
plantation ; but the slaves were white. That the dreadful 
exertions, produced by this forced labour, often caused 
death from exhaustion among children is obvious. A 
Keighley overseer, in giving evidence, told the story 4 of a 
man who came to him, saying : " My little girl is dead." 
I asked, " When did she die ? " and he said : " In the 
night, and what breaks my heart is this ; she went to 
the mill in the morning, but she was not able to do her 
work. A little boy said he would help her if she would 
give him a halfpenny on Saturday, but at night when the 
child went home, perhaps about a quarter of a mile, she 
fell down several times on the road through exhaustion, till 
at length she reached her door with difficulty. She never 
spoke audibly afterwards ; she died in the night." Tragedies 
like this, told in such simple, common-place words, hap- 
pened in not a few homes ; or instead of death, a maimed 
and miserable life of ill-health and disease was slowly 
dragged along till the grave gave a merciful release. One 
might give a long list of such cases, and of various forms 

1 Same evidence, i. 287, 288. 

2 Evidence of Elizabeth Bentley, ib., i. 297. *Ib., i. 298, 299. 
4 Evidence of Gillett Sharpe, ib., i. 302. 

2 c 



402 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

of torture inflicted on children not daring to resist, but in 
this tender age one is not allowed to harrow even the 
feelings of a reader. Yet we may perhaps be allowed to 
quote one more example from a speech of Richard Oastler's 1 : 
" I will not picture fiction to you/' this brave reformer 
said, in the early days of the factory movement, " but I will 
tell you what I have seen. Take a little female captive, 
six or seven years old ; she shall rise from her bed at four 
in the morning of a cold winter day, but before she rises 
she wakes perhaps half-a-dozen times, and says, Father, is 
it time ? Father, is it time ? And at last, when she gets 
up and puts her little bits of rags upon her weary limbs — 
weary yet with the last day's work — she leaves her parents 
in their bed, for their labour (if they have any) is not 
required so early. She trudges alone through rain and 
snow, and mire and darkness, to the mill, and there for 
13, 14, 16, 17, or even 18 hours is she obliged to work 
with only thirty minutes' interval for meals and play. 
Homeward again at night she would go, when she was able, 
but many a time she hid herself in the wool in the mill, as 
she had not strength to go. And if she were one moment 
behind the appointed time ; if the bell had ceased to ring 
when she arrived with trembling, shivering, weary limbs at 
the factory door, there stood a monster in human form, and 
as she passed he lashed her. This," he continued, holding 
up an overlooker's strap, " is no fiction. It was hard at 
work in this town last week. The girl I am speaking of 
died ; but she dragged on that dreadful existence for several 
years." 

Such was the terrible nature of the evidence taken before 
the Sadler Committee of 1833 ; but even yet it was found 
impossible, for various reasons, to get a Bill passed, 2 The 
Government appointed yet another Committee, which, 
however, reported so strongly in favour of legislation, that 
at length something had to be done. The result was the 
famous Act of 1833. 

1 Speech at Huddersfield, Dec. 26, 1831, quoted in Alfred's History, i. 226. 

2 Cf. Taylor, Factory System and Factory Acts ( 189-1), p. 74, 



THE FACTORY SYSTEM 403 

§ 231. The Various Factory Acts. 

But to gain a complete survey of Factory Legislation we 
must go back a few years. After the Act of 1802, already 
referred to, for improving the condition of apprentices, an 
Act x for the regulation of work in cotton mills was passed 
in 1819, allowing no child to be admitted into a factory 
before the age of nine, and placing 12 hours a day as the 
limit of work for those between the ages of nine and 
sixteen. The day was really one of 13 J or 14 hours, 
because no meal-times were included in the working day. 
Then, again, in 1831 an Act 2 was passed forbidding night- 
work in factories for persons between nine and twenty-one 
years of age, while the working day for persons under 
eighteen was to be 12 hours a day, and 9 hours on Satur- 
days. But this legislation only applied to cotton factories ; 
those engaged in the manufacture of wool were quite un- 
touched, and matters there were as bad as ever. But a 
spirit of agitation was fortunately abroad in the country. 
These were the days of the Reform Bill and of the rise of 
Trades Unions. The workmen cried out for the restriction 
of non-adult labour to 10 hours a day, and the Conserva- 
tive party, 3 who were chiefly interested in the land and not 
in the mills, supported them readily against the manu- 
facturers, who were mainly Liberals and Radicals. The 
long struggle against factory slavery was at last successful, 
and one of the most important Acts to prevent it was 
passed. The Act 4 of 1833, introduced by Lord Shaftes- 
bury, prohibited night-work to persons under eighteen in 
both cotton, wool, and other factories ; children from nine 
to thirteen years of age were not to work more than 48 
hours a week, and young persons from thirteen to eighteen 
years were to work only 68 hours. Provision was also 
made for the children's attendance at school, and for the 
appointment of factory inspectors. Children under nine 
years of age were not to be employed at all. These re- 
strictions in the employment of children led to a great 

1 The 59 Geo. III., c. 66. - The 1 and 2 William IV., c. 39. 

3 Cf. Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, pp. 208, 209, 215. 

4 The 3 and 4 William IV., c. 103. 



404 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

increase in the use of improved machinery to make up for 
the loss of their labour, and it is probable that they 
accelerated the use of steam instead of water power 
in the smaller and more old fashioned mills, w r here also 
the worst abuses in children's employment had chiefly 
prevailed. 1 Then, after one or two minor Acts, 2 the 
famous Ten Hours' Bill 3 was passed in 1847, which 
reduced the labour of women and young persons to 10 
hours a day, the legal dsij being between 5.30 A.M. and, 
8.30 P.M. Manufacturers tried to avoid the provisions of 
this Bill by working persons thus protected in relays, and 
making elaborate regulations to nullify the law, 4 but this 
was stopped by the fixing of a uniform working day in 
1850, so that young persons and women could only work 
between the hours of 6 A.M. and 6 P.M., and on Satur- 
days only till 2 P.M. 5 Since the passing of these Acts 
many much-needed extensions of their provisions to other 
industries have been made, especially 6 in 1864, and in 
1874 the minimum age at which a child could be admitted 
to a factory was fixed at ten years. 7 The limitation of the 
labour of women and young persons necessarily involved 
the limitation of men's labour, because their work could 
not be done without female aid. 8 Thus the Ten Hours' 
Day fortunately became universal in factories. 

§ 232. How these Acts were Passed. 

It is curious to notice how these Acts were passed. They 
all showed the steady advance of the principle of State 
interference with labour, a doctrine most distasteful to the 
old Ricardian school of economists, even when that inter- 
ference was made in the interests of the physical and moral 
well-being, not only of the industrial classes, but of the 
community at large. Hence the economists of the day 

1 Cf Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. pp. 626, 627. 

2 The 7 Victoria, c. 15 ; 8 and 9 Vic, c. 29; and others; see Taylor, 
Factory System and Factory Acts (1894), ch. iv. 

3 The 10 Vic., c. 29, and cf. Taylor, ib., pp. 88, 89. 

4 Cf. Taylor, u. s., pp. 89 and 78. 5 The 13 and 14 Victoria, c. 54. 

6 By the 27 and 28 Victoria, c. 38 ; cf Taylor, u. s., p. 95. 

7 The 37 and 38 Victoria, c. 44. 8 Of. Taylor, Factory Acts, p. 107. 



THE FACTORY SYSTEM 405 

aided the manufacturers in opposing these Acts to the 
utmost of their power, and the laws passed were due to the 
action of the Tories and landowners. 1 Lord Shaftesbury, 
Fielden, Oastler, and Sadler were all Tories, though they 
were accused of being Socialists. They were supported by 
the landed gentry, partly out of genuine sympathy with the 
oppressed, and partly out of opposition to the rival manufac- 
turing interest. 2 But the millowners had their revenge 
afterwards when they helped to repeal the Corn Laws, in 
spite of the protest of the landlords, who did not mind the 
workmen having shorter hours at other people's expense, 
but objected to their having cheap bread at their own. It 
has been remarked by an economist, 3 who does not hesitate 
to point out the virtues as well as the vices of the land- 
owners, that, where their own interests were not touched, 
they tried to use their power for the good of the people. 
The remark is so true that it is almost a truism. Most 
men are benevolent as long as benevolence costs them 
nothing. The working classes, however, seem to have a 
suspicion that each political party is their friend only in so 
far as they can injure their opponents, or at least do no 
harm to themselves. The Manchester School of Radical 
Economists bitterly opposed the Factory Acts, and John 
Bright especially distinguished himself (February 10, 1847) 
by his violent denunciation of the Ten Hours' Bill, which he 
characterised as " one of the worst measures ever passed in 
the shape of an Act of the legislature." 4 But when we 
]ook back upon the degradation and oppression from which 
the industrial classes were rescued by this agitation, we can 
understand why Arnold Toynbee said so earnestly : "I 
tremble to think what this country would have been but 
for the Factory Acts." 5 They form one of the most inter- 
esting pages in the history of industry, for they show how 
fearful may be the results of a purely capitalist and com- 

1 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 214. 2 lb. 

3 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution {Are Radicals Socialists?), p. 215. 

4 As John Bright was always looked upon as " the people's friend," it 
may be well to observe that this extraordinary utterance is to be found in 
the records of Hansard, Third Series, Volume LXXXIX., p. 1148. 

5 Industrial Revolution, p. 215. 



4o6 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

petitive industrial system, unless the wage-earners are in a 
position to place an effectual check upon the greed of an 
unscrupulous employer. It may be thought that too large 
a space has been devoted to them in this chapter, but when 
we consider the enormous and profound influence which the 
Factory System has had upon the life of the nation, it must 
be acknowledged that no outline of industrial history would 
be at all adequate that does not include a very marked 
reference both to the system itself and the Acts which now 
regulate it. The factory has so completely revolutionised 
the methods of industry in the last hundred years, and has 
thereby so completely altered the social and industrial life of 
the majority of the workers in this nation, that it is practically 
impossible to overestimate its importance as a feature in 
the national life. How far it has operated for good or for 
ill must be left to the historians of the future; but no one 
who has lived for any length of time (as the writer has 
done) amid the centres of a large manufacturing population, 
can fail to regard with considerable uneasiness the peculiar 
developments of life and character which this system has 
called forth. It has been acutely, if somewhat gloomily, 
remarked 1 that human progress is after all only a surplus 
of advantages over disadvantages, and that being so, one 
must attempt to regard the various disquieting features of 
the Industrial Revolution with philosophic equanimity. Its 
advantages' have been great, but its drawbacks are great 
also, and the greatest drawback of all is probably to be 
found in the concentration of population in large towns, 
where the mill hand spends his life amid surroundings of 
repulsive ugliness, and engaged in an occupation of weari- 
some monotony. The fact that he has grown to like both 
his occupation and his surroundings is possibly a matter for 
even greater concern. But whatever we may think of the 
effects of the factory system, they form a striking example 
of the truth that the history of mankind is to be found 
written in the history of its tools, for there are few factors 
in modern English history more important than the inven- 
tions of the Industrial Revolution. 

1 Lecky, History of the Eighteenth Century, vi. 220. 



tern. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASSES 

§ 233. Disastrous Effects of the New Industrial Systi 

We have already seen, in various preceding chapters, that 
the condition of the labourers deteriorated from the time of 
Elizabeth onwards, but in the middle of the eighteenth 
century it had been materially improved owing to the 
increase of wealth from the new agriculture and to the 
general growth of foreign trade. But then came the great 
Continental wars and the Industrial Revolution, and it is a 
sad but significant fact that, although the total wealth of the 
nation was vastly increased at the end of last century and the 
beginning of this, little of that wealth came into the hands 
of the labourers, but went almost entirely into the hands of 
the great landlords and new capitalist manufacturers, or 
was spent in the enormous expenses of foreign war. 1 We 
saw, too, that the labourer felt far more severely than any 
one else the burden of this war, for taxes had been imposed 
on almost every article of consumption, 2 while at the same 
time the price of wheat had risen enormously. 3 Moreover, 
labour was now more than ever dependent on capital, and 
the individual labourer was thoroughly under the heel of 
his employer. This was due to the new conditions of 
labour, both in agriculture and manufactures, that arose 
after the Industrial and Agricultural Revolution, and to 
the extinction of bye-industries. 4 The workman was now 
practically compelled to take what his employer offered 
him, either in the factory or the farm ; for, as a mill-hand, 
he had nothing to fall back upon except the work offered 
at the mill, while for the agricultural labourer the increase 

1 Above, p. 373. 2 Above, ib.; cf. also Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 489. 

3 Above, p. 375. 4 Above, p. 386. 

407 



408 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

of enclosures, both of the common fields and the waste, had 
deprived him of the resources which he formerly possessed. 1 
Few labourers had now a plot of ground to cultivate, or any 
rights to a common where they could get fuel for themselves 
and pasture for their cattle. The Assessment of Wages by 
the justices had indeed become inoperative, for it seems to 
have practically died out in the south of England at the 
close of the seventeenth century, and in the north at the 
beginning of the eighteenth. 2 But the low rates of pay 
which had been fixed thereby had become almost tradi- 
tional, 3 and from a variety of causes, already alluded to, 
pauperism was growing with alarming rapidity. Moreover, 
it was impossible for the labourer to improve his position 
by agitating for higher wages, for all combination in the 
form now known as Trades Unions was suppressed, and his 
condition sank to the lowest depth of poverty and degrada- 
tion. 

§ 234. The Allowance System of Relief. 

This state of things was aggravated by various misfor- 
tunes, among which the most prominent was the rise in 
the price of food. At the end of the seventeenth century 
there had been a succession of bad harvests, and the price 
of wheat, for the four years ending 1699, was between 64s. 
and 7 Is. a quarter, 4 or more than double the average 5 of 
the four years ending in 1691. This high price was 
maintained till 1710, when there was a considerable fall, 6 
and the price of wheat continued, on the whole, fairly ]ow 
till about 1751. But after that, and especially from 1765, 
the seasons were most unsatisfactory, harvests were poor, 
and the price of wheat rose enormously. 7 

The latter part of the eighteenth century was marked 
by almost chronic scarcity, 8 and after 1790 wheat was 
rarely below 50s. a quarter, and often double that price, 

1 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 101. 

2 Rogers, Economic Interpretation of History, p. 43. 3 lb. 

4 Prothero, English Farming, App. I. (p. 244). 

5 Of figures in Prothero, u. s. 

6 The prices were, in 1710, 78s. a qr. ; in 1714, 50s. ; in 1720, only 37s. 

7 Tooke, History of Prices, i. 66, 82, and i., ch. iii. generally. 8 lb. 



CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASSES 409 

as it was after the deficient harvest of 1795, when the 
price was 108s. a quarter. 1 The famine was enhanced by 
the restrictions of the Corn Laws. Meanwhile, population 
was growing with portentous and almost inexplicable 
rapidity. The factories employed large numbers of hands, 
but these were chiefly children whose parents were often 
compelled to live upon the labour' of their little ones ; 2 and 
the introduction of machinery had naturally caused a 
tremendous dislocation in industry, which could not be 
expected to right itself immediately. 3 Poverty was so 
widespread that, in May 1795, the Berkshire justices, 
in a now famous meeting at Speenhamland, near Newbury, 4 
declared the old quarter sessions assessment of wages unsuit- 
able, besought employers to give rates more in proportion to 
the cost of living, but added that, if employers refused to do 
this, they would make an allowance to every poor family in 
accordance with its numbers, This is the celebrated " Speen- 
hamland Act of Parliament," which never received the sanc- 
tion of law, but was immediately followed in many counties, 
and obeyed much more cheerfully than is sometimes the case 
with the Acts of the Parliament at Westminster. 5 It is, 
therefore, worth while to notice the wording of the resolutions 
which the Berkshire Justices passed, They resolved (1) that 
the present state of the poor does require further assistance 
than has generally been given them ; (2) that it is not 
expedient for the magistrates to grant that assistance by 
regulating the wages of day-labourers, according to the 
directions of the Statutes of the 5 th Elizabeth and 1st 
James ; but the magistrates very earnestly recommend to 
the farmers and others throughout the county to increase 
the pay of their labourers in proportion to the present price 
of provisions ; and, agreeable thereto, the magistrates now 
present have unanimously resolved that they will, in their 
several divisions, make the following calculations and allow- 
ances for the relief of all poor and industrious men and 

1 For prices (average) see Prothero, English Farming, App. I. (p. 244) and 
for 1795 and 1796 specially, Tooke, Prices, i. 182, 187. 

2 Above, p. 397. 

3 Cf. Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 485. 4 Fowle, Poor Law, p. 65. 
5 lb., -p. 66. 



410 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

their families, who, to the satisfaction of the justices of 
their parish, shall endeavour (as far as they can) for their 
own support and maintenance — that is to say, when the 
gallon loaf of seconds flour, weighing 8 lbs. 11 oz., shall 
cost Is., then every poor and industrious man shall have for 
his own support 3s. weekly, either procured by his own or 
his family's labour, or an allowance from the poor rates ; 
and for the support of his wife and every other member of 
the family, Is. 6d. When the gallon loaf shall cost Is. 6d., 
then he shall have 4s. weekly for his own support, and 
Is. lOd. for the support of every other of his family. And 
so, in proportion, as the price of bread rises or falls, that is 
to say, 3d. to the man and Id. to every other of his family 
on every Id. which the loaf rises above Is." 1 

§ 235. The Growth of Pauperism and the old 
Poor Law. 

Such were the celebrated Speenhamland resolutions. 
The fact that the country justices felt compelled to pass 
them shows how desperate the case of the labourer had 
become. His position had grown steadily worse. Pauperism 
had been slowly increasing in the course of the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries, even when agriculture, manufac- 
tures, and commerce were improving, when the price of 
corn was low, and money wages comparatively high ; 2 and 
we may well ask what was the cause of this curious com- 
bination of progress and poverty ? The answer is to be 
found in the conditions which that progress created, and 
especially in the case of agriculture. It becomes increas- 
ingly evident that a very powerful cause of pauperism was 
the system of enclosures, 3 accompanied by evictions 4 of 
farmers and cottagers by landowners, eager to try new 
agricultural improvements. 

Sometimes, also, farmers sent off their labourers on 
turning their fields into pasture ; at others the farmers 
themselves were ejected, and sank into the condition of 

1 See Nicholls, History of the Poor Law, ii. 137. 

2 Cf. Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 100. 

3 Eden, State of the Poor, ii. 30, 147, 384, 550. 

4 Laurence, Duty of a Steward, 3, 4 ; Toynbee, u. s., 100. 



CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASSES 411 

labourers, or swelled the numbers of the unemployed. 1 
The consolidation of farms 2 placed the labourer at the 
mercy of the capitalist farmer, who ground down his wages 
to the lowest possible point ; and enclosures, though ulti- 
mately beneficial, contributed at first rather to the growth 
than to the removal of pauperism. The Act of Elizabeth, 
which provided that each new cottage should have four acres 
of land, was repealed, ostensibly on the ground that it made 
it difficult for the industrious poor to procure habitations ; 
but, in reality, because it did not always suit the selfish 
interests of the landowners. 3 Its repeal was a great blow, 
which was further aggravated by the loss of bye-industries, 
and by the bad harvests already referred to ; and the 
problem of poverty became so acute that the Legislature 
had to devise some method of dealing with it. 

Hence we find several Poor Law Acts passed towards the 
close of the eighteenth century. The most noticeable of 
these was that known as Gilbert's Act, 4 in 1782. It 
alludes to the great increase of expenditure, and the equally 
great increase of pauperism, and, after blaming the parochial 
authorities for this state of things, takes away from them 
the administration of relief. The justices were consti- 
tuted the guardians of the poor and the administrators of 
relief, and power was given to form Unions of parishes by 
voluntary arrangement, and to build a Workhouse for the 
Union. 5 The guardians were expressly forbidden to send 
any but the " impotent " to the workhouse, and were to 
find suitable employment for the able-bodied near their own 
homes. The main result of this well-meaning but fallacious 
measure was to increase the cost of relief some 30 per cent. 
Other Acts, dealing with minor details of administration, 
were subsequently passed, but the decisive step of legalising 
out-door relief to the able-bodied and giving it in aid of 
wages was not taken till 1796. The old workhouse test 
of 1722 was hereby 6 abolished as inconvenient and oppres- 

1 Eden, State of the Poor, i. 329, ii. 30, 384, 550. 

2 Ibid., and Toynbee, Indust. i?ev.,'p. 101. 

3 Fowle, Poor Law, p. 68. Elizabeth's Act was the 31 Eliz., c. 7. 

4 The 22 Geo. III., c. 83. 5 Fowle, Poor Law, p. 69. 
6 The Act 36 Georere III., c. 10 and c. 23. 



412 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

sive, and parish authorities were empowered to give relief 
to any industrious poor person at his own residence. 
Eefusal to enter a workhouse was not to be a reason for 
withholding relief. The justices were also authorised to 
order relief for a certain time to people who were " entitled 
to ask and receive such relief at their own houses." By 
this Act, therefore, an allowance was freely given to every 
poor person who chose to ask for it, and the labourers' 
wages were systematically made up out of the rates. 1 To 
complete the history of this old code of Poor Laws, it may 
be added that in 1801 the Justices were made the rating 
as well as the relieving authority, while, to make them 
" more safe in the execution of their duty," the nominal 
penalty of 2d. only was to be imposed upon a justice who 
made an illegal decision, unless it was plain that he was 
actuated by improper motives. 2 The reason for this 
measure is obvious : the landed gentry, from whom the 
justices were chiefly chosen, were hereby allowed to fix the 
rates, and even to amend them by altering names and 
amounts ; in other words, to adjudicate upon a question in 
which they themselves were the most interested persons 
present. 3 It is, of course, wrong to accuse them of con- 
sciously yielding to self-interest in their decisions ; but no 
one can be surprised to learn that the poor-rate was often 
apportioned so as to fall most heavily upon others than 
themselves, and upon parishes other than those in which 
the rating justices had rateable property. Thus, for ex- 
ample, landowners would sometimes pull down every 
cottage on their estate, 4 so as to compel surrounding 
parishes to pay the poor-rates allowed to the labourers who 
worked on their property ; in other words, the labourers' 
wages were paid half by the employer and half by the un- 
fortunate non-employers in the next parish. 

§ 236. The Poor Law and the Allowance System. 

The burden upon non-employers was, in fact, sometimes 
almost intolerable. The poor-rate, when levied upon house 
1 Fowle, Poor Law, 71, 87. 

a lb. , p. 71. The Act was the 43 George III., c. 141. 3 lb. 

4 Fowle, Poor Law, p. 88. 



CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASSES 413 

property, was simply a rate in aid of wages, paid by those 
who did not employ labour. 1 This was the case not only 
in agricultural districts, but even in manufacturing towns. 
Thus, at Nottingham, employers deliberately reduced the 
rate of wages for stocking making, and then gave their 
men a certificate to the effect that they were only earning 
(say) 6s. per week ; the men then applied to the parish, 
who allowed them 4s. or 5s. more. 2 Those manufacturers 
who employed parish apprentices sometimes even received 
annual payments from the parish for keeping its paupers at 
work. 3 Meanwhile, the poorer ratepayers, on whom the 
burden of rates fell most severely, often earned less and 
worked harder than the paupers whom they helped to 
support. One witness, before the Poor Law Commission of 
1834, summed up their condition in the pregnant sentence : 
" Poor is the diet of the pauper, poorer is the diet of the 
small ratepayer, but poorest is that of the independent 
labourer." 4 Indeed, the independent labourer was in very evil 
case. Often he could not get work, because he was superseded 
by paupers, who were set to work by the overseers at the cost 
of the parish. If an industrious man was known to have 
saved money, he would be left without work till his 
savings were all spent, and then he could be employed as 
a pauper. Sometimes, even, men were discharged by their 
employers till they were reduced to the desired state, 5 so 
that the burden of maintaining them was cast upon the 
parish, while the employer had to pay only a nominal wage. 
The full working of this ingenious plan was seen in the 
" ticket system." Under this the parish sold " the com- 
modity of labour " to the farmers, and made up the differ- 
ence between the labourers' actual wages and the income 
supposed to be his due out of the rates. In one place 
there was a weekly sale of labour, at which an eyewitness 
saw ten men allotted to a farmer for five shillings. 6 It 
was called the "ticket system," because each pauper re- 
ceived a ticket from the overseer as a warrant for the 
farmer to employ him at the cost of the parish. It is not 

1 Fowle, Poor Law, p. 87. 2 lb., p. 87. 3 lb., and ef. above, p.. 388, 

4 lb., p. 86. 5 lb., p. 87, 6 lb., p. 82. 



414 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

surprising that the farmers supported this system, iniquit- 
ous though it was, and declared that " high wages and free 
labour would ruin them." x But in the long run it often 
caused even the farmer some pecuniary loss, not directly, 
for he saved more in his wages-bill than he spent in poor- 
rates, but indirectly, since the work of the labourers thus 
employed was badly and inefficiently performed. 2 

Indeed, we may sum up by saying that the allowance 
system, introduced by the Speenhamland resolutions and 
made law by the Act of 1796, succeeded in demoralising 
both employers and employed alike, taking the responsibility 
of giving decent wages off the shoulders of the farmers, and 
putting a premium upon the incontinence 3 and thriftlessness 
of the labourers. This method of relief was general from 
about 1795 to 1834, in fact, until the enactment of the 
New Poor Law. 4 Employers of labour, manufacturing as 
well as agricultural, 5 put down wages in many parts of the 
country to what was simply a starvation point, knowing 
that an allowance would be made to the labourers, upon the 
magistrates' orders, out of the poor rates. The wages 
actually paid to able-bodied men were frequently only five 
or six shillings a week, but relief to the amount of four, 
five, six, or seven shillings a week, according to the size of 
the man's family, was given out of the rates. Such a 
system could not fail to have a permanently disastrous 
influence upon the moral and social condition of those who 
suffered from it, taking from them all self-reliance, all hope, 
all incentives to improving their position in life. This was 
soon noticed by Arthur Young, who wrote : " Many authors 
have remarked with surprise the great change which has 
taken place in the spirit of the lower classes of the people 
within the last twenty years. There was formerly found an 
unconquerable aversion to depend on the parish, insomuch 
that many would struggle through life with large families 
never applying for relief. That spirit is annihilated ; appli- 

1 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 103. 

2 Fowle, Poor Law, p. 89, on The Deterioration of Labour. 

3 For the sad facts and for the bastardy laws, cf. Fowle, Poor Law, 
pp. 89-92, summarising the evidence of the Commission of 1834. 

4 The 4 and 5 William IV., c. 76. 5 Above, p. 413 (Nottingham). 



CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASSES 415 

cations of ]ate have been as numerous as the poor ; and one 
great misfortune attending the change is that every sort of 
industry flags when once the parochial dependence takes 
place : it then becomes a struggle between the pauper and 
the parish, the one to do as little and to receive as much as 
possible, and the other to pay by no rule but the summons 
and order of the justice. The evils resulting are beyond all 
calculation ; for the motives to industry and frugality are 
cut up by the roots, whenever a poor man knows that if he 
do not feed himself the parish must do it for him ; and that 
he has not the most distant hope of ever attaining indepen- 
dency, let him be as industrious and frugal as he may. To 
acquire land enough to build a cottage on is a hopeless aim 
in ninety-nine parishes out of a hundred." x Unfortunately 
the last sentence of this remark is often true even to-day ; 
nor have the evil traditions of the Old Poor Law entirely 
disappeared. Down to the reform of 1834, "the public 
funds were regarded as a regular part of the maintenance 
of the labouring people engaged in agriculture, and were 
administered by more than 2000 justices, 15,000 sets of 
overseers, and 15,000 vestries, acting always independently 
of each other, and very commonly in opposition, quite un- 
controlled and ignorant of the very rudiments of political 
economy. The £7,000,000 or more 2 of public money was 
the price paid for converting the free labourer into a slave, 
without reaping even such returns as slavery can give. 
The able-bodied pauper was obliged to live where the Law 
of Settlement placed him, to receive the income which the 
neighbouring magistrates thought sufficient, to work for the 
master and in the way which the parish authorities pre- 
scribed, and very often to marry the wife they found for 
him." 3 

§ 237. Restrictions upon Labour. 

What made the condition of the labourers worse still, 
was the fact that they could neither go from one place to 

1 Young, Annals of Agriculture, xxxvi. 504. 

2 For exact sum, cf Porter, Progress of the Nation, i. 82, 

3 Fowle, Poor Law, pp. 73, 74, 



416 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

another to seek work, nor could they combine in industrial 
partnerships for their mutual interests. The Law of Settle- 
ment effectually prevented migration of labourers from one 
parish to another. It began with the Statute x of 1662, 
which allowed a pauper to obtain relief only from that 
parish where he had his settlement, " settlement " being 
defined as forty days' residence without interruption. The 
reason was that each parish, though ready to pay for its 
own poor, was not willing to pay for those of other parishes. 
There were many variations and complications of this 
Statute made in ensuing reigns, but it remained substan- 
tively the same 2 till it was mitigated by the Poor Law of 
1834. Its main results were seen, as Adam Smith re- 
marked, 3 in the " obstruction of the free circulation of 
labour," and consequently in the great inequality in wages 
which was frequently found in places at no great distance 
one from another. Nowhere else, he says, 4 does one " meet 
with those sudden and unaccountable differences in the 
wages of neighbouring places which we sometimes find in 
England, where it is often more difficult for a poor man to 
pass the artificial boundary of a parish than an arm of the 
sea or a ridge of mountains." Again he remarks 5 : " there 
is scarce a poor man in England of forty years of age, I 
will venture to say, who has not in some part of his life 
felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived 
Law of Settlements." 6 

§ 238. The Combination Acts. 

The Law of Settlement was further strengthened by what 
are called the Combination Laws, 7 which forbade workmen 
to meet together in order to deliberate over their various 

1 The 13 and 14 Charles II., c. 12. 

2 Although it was nominally repealed. Fowle, Poor Law, 70, 84. For 
the whole question, see Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk. I., ch. x. 
(Vol. L, p. 144, Clarendon Press edn.). 

3 Wealth of Nations, u. s., i. 148. 4 lb. 5 lb., i. 149. 

6 Cf also Toynbee's remarks, Industrial Revolution, p. 186. 

7 These date from the 2 and 3 Ed. VI., c. 15, prohibiting "all con- 
spiracies and covenants not to do their work but at a certain price," under 
penalty of the pillory and loss of an ear. Other acts were passed, but all 
were summed up in the famous 40 Geo. III., c. 60. 



CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASSES 417 

industrial interests, or to gain a rise in wages. " We have 
no Acts of Parliament," said Adam Smith, 1 with justice, 
" against combining to lower the price of work, but many 
against combining to raise it." For "when masters com- 
bine together in order to reduce the wages of their workmen, 
they commonly enter into a private bond or agreement, not 
to give more than a certain wage under a certain penalty. 
Were the workmen to enter into a contrary combination of 
the same kind, not to accept a certain wage under a certain 
penalty, the law would punish them very severely ; and if 
it dealt impartially, 2 it would treat the masters in the same 
manner." Elsewhere he describes the inevitable result of 
a strike as being " nothing but the punishment or ruin of 
the ringleaders." 3 The legislation of the close of the 
eighteenth century was all in favour of the masters, and 
after several acts had been passed regulating combinations 
in separate trades, the famous Act 4 of 1800 was applied 
to all occupations, and strictly forbade all combinations, 
unions, or associations of workmen for the purpose of 
obtaining an advance in wages or lessening the hours of 
work. All freedom of action was taken away from the 
workmen : " the only freedom," remarks an eminent and 
impartial judge 5 "for which the law seems to me to have 
been specially solicitous is the freedom of employers from 
coercion by their men." The reason is obvious ; it was 
because the working classes had no voice in the govern- 
ment of the state, and were unable to check a measure 
inspired only by the self-interest of the employers. As yet 
they had no political influence whatever, except that un- 
satisfactory and unconstitutional influence which emanates 
from the violence of a riotous mob. 6 " The English 
statute-book was disfigured by laws which robbed the 
labourer as a wage-earner, and degraded him as a citizen," 

1 Wealth of Nations, Bk. I., ch. viii. (Vol. I., p. 70). 

2 lb., Bk. I., ch. x. (Vol. I., p. 150). 

3 lb., Bk. L, ch. viii. (Vol. I., p. 71). 

4 The 40 Geo. III. , c. 60 ; see Howell, Trades Unionism New and Old, 
p. 39. 

5 Justice Stephen, History of the Criminal Law, iii. 208. 

6 Cf. Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 186. 

2 D 



4i 8 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

for " the power of making laws was concentrated in the 
hands of the landowners, the great merchant-princes, and 
a small knot of capitalist-manufacturers, who wielded that 
power in the interests of their class rather than for the 
good of the people." 1 No doubt the action of these law- 
makers was natural, but it is only another example of the 
fact that no one class, and, for that matter, no single 
individual, is fit to possess irresponsible and absolute power 
over another. In spite of Utopian theorists, selfishness is 
still the predominant factor in human nature ; and the 
most feasible, if not the most ideal, form of government is 
that in which the selfishness of one class is counteracted by 
the selfishness of another. But in 1800 the workmen 
had, of course, no political influence : they could only show 
their discontent by riots and rick-burnings. Yet the time 
of their deliverance was at hand. 

I have already referred to the sympathy between the 
French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The 
former, it is true, frightened our statesmen and delayed 
reform, but it gave courage to the working classes, and 
made them hope fiercely for freedom. The latter Revolu- 
tion concentrated men more and more closely together in 
large centres of industry, dissociated them from their em- 
ployers, and roused a spirit of antagonism which is inevit- 
able when both employers and employed alike fail to recog- 
nise the essential identity of their interests. Now, wherever 
there are large bodies of men crowded together, there is 
always a rapid spread of new ideas, new political enthusi- 
asms, and social activities. And in spite of the lack of the 
franchise, the artisans of our large towns made their voices 
heard ; fiercely and roughly, no doubt, and often at first in 
riot and uproar, but they had no other means. There were 
found some statesmen in Parliament, chiefly disciples of 
Adam Smith, 2 who gave articulate utterance to the demands 
of labour, and owing to their endeavours the Combination 
Laws were annulled 3 in 1824. All previous statutes, so 
far as they related to combinations of workmen, were 

1 Cf. Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 186. 2 lb., p. 195. 

3 By the 5 Geo. IV., c. 95. 



CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASSES 419 

repealed, and those who joined such associations were to be 
no longer liable to be prosecuted for conspiracy. But the 
following year proved how insecure was the position of the 
labourers without definite political influence. The em- 
ployers of labour were able to induce Parliament in 1825 
to stultify itself, 1 by declaring illegal any action which 
miofht result from those deliberations of workmen which 
a twelvemonth before they had legalised. But still the 
workers were allowed to deliberate, strange as it may now 
seem that permission was needed for this, and their delibera- 
tions materially aided in passing the Reform Bill of 1832. 
For as soon as a class can make its voice heard, even though 
it cannot directly act, other classes will take that utterance 
into account. 

§ 239. Growth of Trades Unions. 2 

But the Reform Bill, though a great step forward, some- 
what belied the hopes that had roused the enthusiasm of 
its industrial supporters. The workmen found that, after 
all, it merely threw additional power into the hands of the 
upper and middle classes. 3 Their own position was hardly 
improved. Therefore they had to make their voice heard 
again, and, urged on by the misery and poverty in which 
they were still struggling, they demanded the Charter. The 
Chartist 4 movement (1838 to 1848) seems to us at the 
present time almost ludicrously moderate in its demands. 
The vote by ballot, the abolition of property qualifications 
for electors, and the payment of parliamentary members, 
were the main objects of its leaders, though they asked for 
universal suffrage as well. Nevertheless people were fright- 
ened, especially when the Chartists wished to present a 
monster petition at Westminster on April 10th, 1848 ; and 

1 In the Act 6 Geo. IV., c. 129. This Act rendered men liable to punish- 
ment for the use of threats, intimidation, and obstruction directed towards 
the attainment of the objects of Trade Unions; cf. also Toynbee, u. s., 
p. 195. 

2 For the history of these, cf. G. Howell, Conflicts of Capital and Labour, 
and Trades Unionism New and Old. 

3 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 196. 

4 See Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement generally. 



420 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

the aid of both military and police was invoked. The move- 
ment collapsed, and finally died away when the repeal of 
the Corn Laws had restored prosperity to the nation. Many 
have laughed at the working classes for trying to gain some 
infinitesimal fraction of political power ; but working men 
are generally acute, especially where their own interests are 
concerned, and they saw that this was the ultimate means 
of material prosperity ; nor has the event failed to justify 
their belief. 1 In the somewhat quieter times which followed 
the collapse of the Chartists, their influence went on extend- 
ing, and though the workmen ceased to agitate they were 
not idle, but continued steadily organising themselves in 
Trades Unions. A large number of Unions were formed 
between 1850 and I860. 2 These institutions were not, 
however, recognised by law till a Commission was appointed, 
including Sir William Erie, Lord Elcho, and Thomas Hughes, 
to inquire into their constitution and objects (February 
1867). Their Report disclosed the existence of intimida- 
tion, with occasional outrages — as was natural when the 
men had no other way of giving utterance to their wishes 
— but on the whole the Report was in favour of the repeal 
of the Act of 1825. This Act was accordingly repealed. 3 
The Unions were legalised by the Trade Union Act of 1871, 
and this Act 4 was further extended 5 and amended in 1875 
and 1876. The old law of master and servant had passed 
away, and employer and employed were now on an equal 
political footing. It has remained for the men by the 
exercise of silent strength to place themselves on an equal 
footing in other respects. Meanwhile the employers, 
alarmed at Trades Unionism, had entered into a similar 
combination by forming the National Federation of Em- 
ployers 6 in 1873, and the long struggle of the working 
classes for industrial freedom did not result in any lessening 

1 Toynbee points this out very clearly, and shows how political influence 
led to the legislation of Trade Unions ; Industrial Revolution, p. 196. 

2 Howell, Trades Unionism New and Old, p. 59. 

3 By the 38 and 39 Victoria, c. 31 and c. 32. 

4 The 34 and 35 Victoria, c. 31 and 32 ; Howell, Trades Unionism New 
and Old, p. 61. 

5 By the 38 and 39 Victoria, c. 86. 

6 Of. Webb, History of Trades Unionism, pp. 312, 313. 



CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASSES 421 

of the feeling of class antagonism. 1 The formation in 1895 
of the Industrial Union of Employers and Employed is a 
recent attempt to bring about better relations between 
master and man, 2 and if its objects were carried out on a 
wide scale, it would do much good. Apart from the ques- 
tion of antagonism, Trades Unions have done much to gain 
a greater measure of material prosperity for the working 
classes, and to give them a larger share than formerly in 
the wealth which the workers have helped to create. When 
we look back upon the last half-century, we are inclined to 
wonder that trades unionists have been so moderate in their 
demands, considering the misery and poverty amidst which 
they grew up. 

§ 240. The Working Classes Fifty Years Ago. 

For it must continually be remembered that the condi- 
tion of the mass of the people in the first half of this 
century was one of the deepest depression. Several writers 
have commented upon this, and have taken occasion to 
remark upon the great progress in the prosperity of the 
working classes since that time. It is true they have pro- 
gressed since then, but it has hardly been progress so much 
as a return to the state of things about 1760 or 1770. 
The fact has been, that after the introduction of the new 
industrial system the condition of the working classes rapidly 
declined ; wages were lower, 3 and prices, at least of wheat, 
were often higher ; 4 till at length the lowest depth of 
poverty was reached about the beginning of the reign of 
Queen Victoria.. Since then their condition has been 
gradually improving, partly owing to the philanthropic 
labours of men like Lord Shaftesbury, and partly owing to 
the combined action of working-men themselves. To quote 
the expression of that well-known statistician, Mr Giffen : 5 

1 Cf. Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, pp. 196-198. 

2 See the Report of the Preliminary Industrial Conference held at 
London, March 16, 1894 (Methuen, London). 

3 See the tables in Porter, Progress of the Nation, ii. 252, 253. 

4 Porter, Progress of the Nation, i. 156 ; Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, 
p. 101. 

5 Essays in Finance, Second Series (1886), p. 390, on Progress of the Work- 
ing Classes. 



422 



INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 



"It is a matter of history that pauperism was^nearly break- 
ing down the country half a century ago. The expenditure 
on poor law relief early in the century and down to 1830-31 
was nearly as great at times as it is now. With half the 
population in the country that there now is, the burden "of 
the poor was the same." The following table will show l 
the actual figures of English pauperism at a time when the 
wealth of the nation was advancing by leaps and bounds. 



Year. 


Population. 


Poor Rate raised. 


Rate per head of 
population. 








,s. d. 


1760 


7,000,000 


£1,250,000 


3 7 


1784 


8,000,000 


£2,000,000 


5 


1803 


9,216,000 


£4,077,000 


8 11 


1818 


11,876,000 


£7,870,000 


13 3 


1820 


12,046,000 


£7,329,000 


12 2 


1830 


13,924,000 


£6,829,000 


10 9 


1841 


15,911,757 


£4,760,929 


5 llf 



It will be noticed that the rate was highest in 1818, which 
was shortly after the close of the great Continental War, 
but fell rapidly after 1830, and since 1841 the rate per 
head of population has not been much more than six or 
seven shillings. 

But the mere figures of pauperism, significant though 
they are, can give no idea of the vast amount of misery 
and degradation which the majority of the working classes 
suffered. 2 The tale of their sufferings may be studied in the 
Blue-books and Reports 3 of the various Commissions which 
investigated the state of industrial life in the factories, 
mines, and workshops between 1833 and 1842 ; or it may 
be read in the burning pages of Engels' 4 State of the 
Working Classes in England in 1844, which is little more 

1 The first figure is from Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 94 ; others 
from Porter, Progress of the Nation, i. 82, 83 ; ii. 362, 363. 

2 " The fact is," said Toynbee {Ind. Rev., p. 58), " the more we examine 
the actual course of affairs, the more we are amazed at the unnecessary 
suffering that has been inflicted on the people." 

3 E.g., Reports on Employment of Children in Factories, 1816, 1833, and 
(mines) 1842. 

4 This book, though avowedly Socialist, and written in a very one-sided 
tone, is nevertheless accurate as to facts, which are all taken from the 
above-mentioned Reports. It forms a convenient book of reference. It 
was published in German in 1845, and in a new English edition in 1892. 



CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASSES 423 

than a sympathetic resume of the facts set forth in official 
documents. We hear of children and young people in 
factories overworked and beaten as if they were slaves ; x 
of diseases and distortions only found in manufacturing 
districts ; 2 of filthy, wretched homes, where people huddled 
together like wild beasts ; 3 we hear of girls and women 
working underground in the dark recesses of the coal- 
mines, dragging loads of coal in cars in places where no 
horses could go, and harnessed and crawling along the 
subterranean pathways like beasts of burden. 4 Everywhere 
we find cruelty and oppression, and in many cases the 
workmen were but slaves, bound to fulfil their masters' 
commands under fear of dismissal and starvation. Freedom 
they had in name ; freedom to starve and die ; but not 
freedom to speak, still less to act, as citizens of a free state. 
They were often even obliged to buy their food at exor- 
bitant prices out of their scanty wages at a shop kept by 
their employer, where it is needless to say that they paid 
the highest possible price for the worst possible goods. 
This was rendered possible by the system of paying work- 
men in tickets or orders upon certain shops, which were 
under the supervision of their employers. It was called 
the " truck system " ; and was at length finally condemned 
by the law 5 (1887) after many futile attempts had been 
made to suppress it. 6 

But though, as a matter of fact, the sufferings of the 
working classes during the transition period of the Indus- 
trial Revolution were aggravated by the extortions of 
employers, and by the partiality of a legislature which 

1 See above, pp. 389, 400, 401. 2 Of. Engels (ed. 1892), pp. 151-164. 

3 Engels (ed. 1892), pp. 23-73, on The Great Towns. His evidence is 
really appalling. 

4 Engels, pp. 241-260 ; and Report on Employment in Mines, 1842. 

5 By the 50 and 51 Victoria, c. 46, amending the 1 and 2 William IV., 
c. 37. 

6 The 22 Geo. II., c. 27 ; the 57 Geo. III., cc. 115 and 122 ; the 1 Geo. IV., 
c. 93, were all measures passed against " truck," and all ineffectual. The 
system, however, has its apologists (cf Cunningham, Growth of Industry, 
ii. 650) as being convenient, and the simplest way of providing workers 
with provisions in out-of-the-way villages. For a vivid description of a 
scene at a truck-shop, see Disraeli's novel Sybil, Bk. III., ch. iii. See 
also note in Rogers' edition of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, i. 150. 



424 



INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 



forbade them to take common measures in self-defence, 
yet there was, in addition to the Revolution itself, one 
great cause which underlay all these minor causes, namely, 
the Continental war which ended in 1815. It has been 
forcibly and accurately expressed by a great economist : 
" Thousands of homes were starved in order to find the 
means for the great war, the cost of which was really 
supported by the labour of those who toiled on and earned 
the wealth that was lavished freely — and at good interest 
for the lenders — by the Government. The enormous taxa- 
tion and the gigantic loans came from the store of 
accumulated capital which the employers wrung from the 
poor wages of labour, or which the landlords extracted 
from the growing gains of their tenants. To outward 
appearance the strife was waged by armies and generals ; 
in reality, the sources on which the struggle was based 
were the stint and starvation of labour, the overtaxed and 
underfed toils of childhood, the underpaid and uncertain 
employment of men." x 

§ 241. Wages. 

And, indeed, if we examine some of the wages actually 
paid at the beginning of this century, and again at the 
beginning of Queen Victoria's reign, we shall find that 
they were excessively low. The case of common weavers 
was particularly hard in the years of the great war, and 
affords an interesting example of the decrease of wages in 
this period. For purposes of comparison I append the 
price of wheat and of weekly wages in the same years ; 



Yeak. 


Weavers' Wages. 2 


Wheat per qr.3 




s. d. 


s. d. 


1802 


13 10 


67 9 


1806 


10 6 


76 9 


1812 


6 4 


122 8 


1816 


5 2 


76 2 


1817 


4 U 


94 



1 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 505. 

2 Leone Levi, History of British Commerce, p. 146. 

3 Porter, Progress of the Nation, i. 156. The prices are averages from the 
London Gazette, and were frequently far higher in the course of the year. 



CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASSES 425 



for the price of wheat forms a useful standard by which to 
gauge the real value of wages, even when it is not con- 
sumed in large quantities. It will be seen that wages were 
at their lowest point just after the conclusion of the war, 
while, on the other hand, wheat was almost at famine 
prices. After this, however, and till 1830, the wages of 
weavers rose again, for the new spinning machinery had 
increased the supply of yarn at a much greater rate than 
weavers could be found to weave it, and hence there was 
an increased demand for weavers, and they gained propor- 
tionately higher wages, the average for woollen cloth 
weavers from 1830-1845 being 14s. to 17s. a week, and 
for worsted stuff weavers lis. to 14s. a week. 1 But even 
these rates are miserably low. 

The wages of spinners were also very poor, the work 
being mostly done by women and children, though when 
men are employed they get fairly good pay. The following 
table 2 will show clearly the various rates, and it will be seen 
that here wages sink steadily till 1845, owing to the rapid 



Spinneks. 


1808-15. 


1815-23. 


1823-30. 


1830-36. 


1836-45. 


Men 
Women ... 


24/ to 26 
13/ to 14/ 


24/ to 26/ 
13/ to 14/ 


24/ to 26/ 
11/ to 12/ 


24/ to 26/ 
8/ to 10/ 


24/ to 26/ 
7/ to 9/ 



production of the new machinery. The women's wages 
exhibit the fall most markedly, the labour of children being 
already affected to some extent by the provisions of the 
Factory Acts. As for the agricultural labourer, he, too, 
suffered from low wages, the general average to 1845 being 
8s. to 10s. a week, and generally nearer the former than 
the latter figure. 3 In fact, the material condition of the 
working classes of England was at this time in the lowest 
depths of poverty and degradation, and this fact must 

1 From a Table of Wages and Prices, 1720-1886, by Thomas Illingworth, 
Bradford (privately printed). 

2 lb. Cf. also Porter, Progress of the Nation, ii. 253, where women's 
wages decrease from 10s. in 1805 to 8s. 5Jd. in 1833. 

3 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 510. According to the Parliamentary Report 
of 1822 {Reports, &c, 1822, v. 73) agricultural wages had sunk from 15s. or 
16s. a week before 1815 to 9s. a week in 1822. 



426 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

always be remembered in comparing the wages of to-day 
with those of former times. Some people who ought to 
know better are very fond of talking about the " progress of 
the working classes " in the last fifty years, and the Jubilee 
of Queen Victoria in 1887 afforded ample opportunity — of 
which full advantage was taken — for such optimists to talk 
statistics. But to compare the wages of labour properly we 
must go back a hundred years, and not fifty, for fifty years 
ago the English workman was passing through a period of 
misery which we must devoutly hope, for the sake of the 
nation at large, will not occur again. It is interesting to 
note, though it is impossible here to go fully into the 
subject, that in trades where workmen have combined, since 
the repeal of the Conspiracy Laws in 1825 and the altera- 
tion in the Act of Settlement, 1 wages have perceptibly risen. 
Carpenters, masons, and colliers afford examples of such a rise. 2 
But where there has been no combination, it is noteworthy 
how little wages have risen in proportion to the increased 
production of the modern labourer, and to the higher cost 
of living, nor does the workman always receive his due 
share of the wealth which he helps to create. Of the 
results of labour combinations we shall, however, have 
something to say in the final chapter of this book. But 
there was one class of people who happened to obtain a very 
large share of the national wealth, and who grew rich and 
flourished while the working classes were almost starving. 
In spite of war abroad and poverty at home, the rents of 
the landowners increased, and the agricultural interest 
received a stimulus which has resulted in a very natural 
reaction. The rise in rents and the recent depression of 
modern agriculture will form the subject of our next 
chapter. 

1 Above, p. 416. 

2 Thomas Illingworth's table, cited above. Carpenters' wages have risen 
from 23s. or 24s. in 1823-30 to 30s. -32s. in 1886; masons from 23s. -26s. to- 
32s.-34s. ; colliers from 16s. -18s. to 22s. -28s. 



CHAPTER XXV 

THE EISE AND DEPRESSION OF MODERN AGRICULTURE 

§ 242. Services Rendered by the Great Landoivners. 

Although there have been occasions in our industrial 
history when one is compelled to admit that the deeds of 
the landed gentry have called for anything but admiration, 
we yet must not overlook the great services which this class 
rendered to the agricultural interest in the eighteenth cen- 
tury. It has been already mentioned that the development 
and the success of English agriculture in the half-century or 
more before the Industrial Revolution was remarkable and 
extensive ; and this success was due to the efforts of the 
landowners 1 in introducing new agricultural methods. They 
took an entirely new departure, and adopted a new system. 
It consisted, as was mentioned before, in getting rid of bare 
fallows and poor pastures by substituting root-crops and 
artificial grasses. 2 The fourfold or Norfolk rotation of crops 
was introduced, 3 the landowners themselves taking an interest 
in and superintending the cultivation of their land and 
making useful experiments upon it. The number of these 
experimenting landlords was very considerable, and in course 
of time, though not by any means immediately, the tenant 
farmers followed them, and thus agricultural knowledge and 
skill became more and more widely diffused. 4 The reward 
of the landowners came rapidly. They soon found their pro- 
duction of corn doubled and their general produce trebled. 5 

1 Rogers, Six Centuries, pp. 472-475 ; Prothero, Agriculture in England in 
Diet. Pol. Econ. 

2 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 468. 

3 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 43. 

4 In 1836 Porter, Progress of the Nation, i. 149, mentions the various 
improvements in farming in a way which shows that by that time they 
were very widely employed. 

5 Rogers, Economic Interpretation, 269. 



428 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

They were able to exact higher rents, 1 for they had taught 
their tenants how to make the land pay better, and, of 
course, claimed a share of the increased profit. About the 
years 1740-50 the rent of land, according to Jethro Tull, 
was 7s. an acre ; 2 some twenty years or more afterwards 
Arthur Young found the average rent of land to be 10s. an 
acre, and thought that in many cases it ought to have been 
more. Before very long it became more, indeed. 3 Between 
1790 and 1836 rent was at least doubled in every part of 
the country, and in many cases it was multiplied four or five 
times. Thus we are told, by a very competent authority, 4 
that in Essex farms could be pointed out which just before 
the war of the French Revolution let at less than 10s. an 
acre ; but their rent rose rapidly during the war, till in 
1812 it was 45s. to 50s. an acre; and though the rent 
was subsequently reduced, it remained double the figure of 
1790. In Berkshire and Wiltshire, farms let at 14s. an 
acre rose to 70s. in 1810, and after a reduction were still 
30s. in 1836, which gives an advance of no less than 114 
per cent, on the first figure. 5 In Staffordshire, again, several 
farms on one estate are instanced, which in 1790 let at 8s. 
an acre, and after having advanced to 35s., were afterwards 
lowered to 20s., an advance of 150 per cent, within less 
than half a century. 6 In Norfolk, Suffolk, and Warwick, 
the same, or nearly the same, rise was experienced, and it 
is more than probable that it was general throughout 
the kingdom. During the same period the prices of 
most of the articles which constitute the landowners' expen- 
diture fell materially, so that, this writer remarks, "if 
his condition be not improved in a corresponding degree, 
that circumstance must arise from improvidence or 
miscalculation or habits of expensive living beyond even 
what would be warranted by the doubling of income 
which he has experienced and is still enjoying." 7 In 
fact, it is evident that the employment of the new 

1 Porter, Progress of the Nation, i. 164, gives some startling instances. 

2 Quoted by Rogers, Economic Interpretation, p. 268. 

3 Cf. Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 477. 

4 Porter, Progress of the Nation, i. 164. 5 lb., i. 165. 6 lb. 7 lb. 



MODERN AGRICULTURE 429 

methods in agriculture considerably benefited the land- 
owners, though the rise in rent is not to be attributed solely 
to this cause. 1 It is probable that the landowner would not 
have done so much for agriculture if he had not expected to 
make something out of his experiments ; but the fact that 
he was animated by an enlightened self-interest does not 
make his work any the less valuable. The pioneers of this 
improved agriculture came from Norfolk, among the first 
being Lord Townshend and Mr Coke, the descendant of the 
great Chief Justice. The former introduced into Norfolk 
the growth of turnips and artificial grasses, and was laughed 
at by his contemporaries as Turnip Townshend ; the latter 
was the practical exponent of Arthur Young's theories as to 
the advantages to be derived from large farms and capitalist 
farmers. 2 With improvements in cultivation, and the 
increase both of assiduity and skill, came a corresponding 
improvement in the live stock. The general adoption of 
root crops in place of bare fallows, and the extended cultiva- 
tion of artificial grasses, supplied the farmer with a great 
increase of winter feed, the quality and nutritive powers of 
which were greatly improved. 3 Hence with abundance of 
fodder came abundance of stock, while at the same time 
great improvements took place in breeding. This was 
mainly due to Bake well (1760-85), who has been aptly 
described as " the founder of the graziers' art." 4 He was 
the first scientific breeder of sheep and cattle, and the 
methods which he adopted with his Leicester sheep and 
longhorns were applied throughout the country by other 
breeders to their own animals. 5 The growth of population 
also caused a new impetus to be given to the careful rearing 
and breeding of cattle for the sake of food, while the sheep 
especially became even more useful than before, since, in 
addition to the value of its fleece, its carcase now was more 

1 It was due, e.g., also to the rise in the price of corn, which came from 
(1) bad harvests, (2) growth of population, and (3) the great increase in 
prices during the war. 

2 Prothero, Agriculture in England, in Diet. Pol. Econ., and also Pioneers 
of English Farming (1881), p. 79. 

3 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 475. 

4 Prothero, Agriculture in England, in Diet. Pol. Econ. 

5 lb. ; cf. also his Pioneers and Progress of English Farming generally. 






430 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

in demand than ever for meat. In various ways, therefore, 
the improvements in agriculture mark a very important 
advance, and the close of the eighteenth century witnessed 
changes in the field as great in their way as those in the 
factory. 

§ 243. The Agricultural Revolution. 

The new agriculture, indeed, brought with it a revolu- 
tion as important in its way as the Industrial Revolution. 
One of the chief features of the change — the enclosures — 
has been already commented upon. 1 The enclosure of the 
common fields was beneficial, 2 and to a certain extent 
justifiable, for the tenants paid rent for them to the lord 
of the manor. But it was effected at a great loss to the 
smaller tenant, and when his common of pasture was 
enclosed as well, he was greatly injured, 3 while the agricul- 
tural labourer was permanently disabled. Whereas between 
1710 and 1760 only some 300,000 acres had been 
enclosed, in the period between 1760 and 1843 nearly 
seven million underwent the same process. 4 The en- 
closure system, however, was only part of a great change 
that was passing over the country ; it was but another sign 
of the introduction of capitalist methods into modern in- 
dustry. We have already noted the growth of the capitalist 
element in manufactures, and have seen how the small 
manufacturer died out, while his place was taken by the 
owner of one or more huge factories, who employed hun- 
dreds of men under him ; and now we see very much the 
same process in agriculture. The small farmer and the 
yeoman disappear, and the large capitalist takes his 
place. The substitution of large for small farms is, in fact, 
one of the chief signs of the Agricultural Revolution. 5 
It was both the cause and the effect of the enclosures; 

1 Above, pp. 274, 275 ; also Prothero, Pioneers, pp. 66-74. 

2 Above, p. 275 ; and Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 89. 
3 /6.,p. 89. 

4 lb., p. 89 ; cf. Prothero, Pioneers, p. 71, who mentions that from 1777 
to 1793 only 599 Enclosure Acts were passed, but from 1793 to 1809 no less 
than 1052 Acts, involving some four-and-a-half million acres. 

5 Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 89. 



MODERN AGRICULTURE 431 

and, of course, as large farms could only be worked by men 
possessed of large capital, it marks very clearly the growth 
of capitalist methods. 1 It should be noted, however, that 
the reason for enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries was quite different from that which caused them 
in the sixteenth century. The earlier were for the sake of 
pasture, and the later to get land for tillage. 2 That the 
changes induced by the new system have been beneficial 
to agriculture no one will attempt to deny, just as no one 
can dispute the benefits conferred upon industry by the 
use of machinery ; but, at the same time, one cannot be 
blind to the fact that these great industrial changes, both 
in manufactures and agriculture, brought a great amount of 
misery with them, both to the smaller employers and the 
mass of the employed. " The change in agriculture brought 
with it a new agricultural and social crisis more severe than 
that of the Tudor period. The [eighteenth] century closed 
with the miseries that resulted from enclosures, consolida- 
tion of holdings, and the reduction of thousands of small 
farmers to the ranks of wage-dependent labourers. The 
result of the crisis was to consolidate large estates, extin- 
guish the yeomanry and peasant proprietary, to turn the 
small farmers into hired labourers, and to sever the con- 
nection of the labourer from the soil. 1 ' 3 In a comparatively 
short time the face of rural England was completely 
changed ; the common fields, those quaint relics of primi- 
tive times, were almost entirely swept away, and the large 
enclosed fields of to-day, with their neat hedgerows and 
clearly-marked limits, had taken their places. There is a 
far wider difference between the rural England of the 
beginning of the nineteenth century, and the beginning 
of the seventeenth or even eighteenth, than between 
the England of William of Orange and of William of 
Normandy. 

1 Porter, Progress of the Nation, i. 181, remarks how both in England 
and Scotland " the tendency has been to enlarge the size of farms, and to 
place them under the charge of men possessed of capital. " 

2 Prothero, Pioneers, p. 72. 

3 Prothero, Agriculture in England, in Diet. Pol. Econ., p. 29, and 
Pioneers of English Farming, p. 73. 



432 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

The improvements in agriculture, the enclosures, the 
consolidation of small into large farms, and the appearance 
of the capitalist farmer are, then, the chief signs of the 
Agricultural Revolution. They form an almost exact 
parallel to the inventions of machinery, the bringing 
together of workers in factories, the consolidation of small 
bye-occupations into larger and more definite trades, and 
the appearance of the capitalist millowner in the realm of 
manufacturing industry. Concurrently with these changes 
we notice certain contemporaneous events which, though 
not first causes, 1 were still important factors in the general 
Revolution. These are the increase of population, the 
growth of speculative farming by capitalists, and the high 
prices of grain. Upon the increase of population we have 
already 2 commented, and it is needless to point out how it 
encouraged agriculture by enlarging the home market for 
food products. The second and third facts — speculative 
farming and high prices of grain — are to some extent con- 
nected, and were due not only to the scarcity which 
marked the harvests at the close of the eighteenth century, 
and the consequent pressure of population upon subsist- 
ence, but also to the artificial conditions created by the 
Corn Laws. 3 Upon the Corn Laws we shall have some- 
thing to say almost immediately ; here it should be re- 
marked that the bad harvests of 1765 to 1774, and the 
irregularity of the seasons from 1775 onwards, caused 
exceedingly violent fluctuations in the price of corn, 4 and 
these fluctuations were the opportunity of the speculative 
capitalist farmer. In March 1780, wheat was 38s. 3d. 
a qr., at Michaelmas of that year 48s., and in March 1781 
it rose to 56s. lid. 5 Now these violent fluctuations of 
price gave to those who could hold large stocks of corn the 
opportunity of gaining enormous profits, while the smaller 
men, who either worked in common fields or had small 

1 It is rather strange that Dr Cunningham {Growth of Industry, ii. 480) 
should say that these three minor facts were the chief causes " whereby 
the whole character of English agriculture was changed. " 

2 Above, p. 349. 3 Cf Prothero, Pioneers of English Farming, p. 83. 

4 Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 476, 477. 

5 Tooke, Prices, i. 76. 



MODERN AGRICULTURE 433 

separate holdings, were generally compelled to realise their 
corn immediately after harvest, and consequently suffered 
severely when prices were low. 1 In 1779, for instance, 
many farmers were ruined by low prices, 2 and yet in other 
years prices were often excessively high. The nature of 
these violent fluctuations, caused partly by real scarcity and 
partly by the Corn Laws, was aggravated during the war 
by the fact that hardly any foreign supplies of corn were 
available owing to the interruption of commerce ; and in 
any case there was not as yet that enormous import of 
foreign grain which to-day serves to steady the prices of 
the home market. But these alternations of high and low 
prices caused an amount of speculation which brought 
farming into the same category as the uncertainties of the 
Stock Exchange, and while it often brought huge profits to 
those who had capital enough to wait, led many of the 
smaller farmers into ruin. Thus the disappearance of 
small farms, already begun, was largely accelerated, and an 
important feature of the Agricultural Revolution became 
still more strongly marked. On the average, however, we 
find that the prices of grain, apart from these fluctuations, 
were steadily rising, and grain-growing continued to be very 
profitable to those who could afford to disregard sudden 
alterations in prices. The reason for the profits of agricul- 
ture at this period we can now examine. 

§ 244. The Stimulus caused by the Bounties. 

The real commencement of the system of imposing heavy 
protective duties upon the importation of grain from abroad 
in the interest of the landowners was the Act 22 Charles 
IT., c. 13. This Act 3 practically prohibited import except 
when wheat was at famine prices, as it happened to be in 
1662, when it was 62s. 9Jd. a quarter, the ordinary aver- 
age price being 41s. 4 But it did not reach this price again 
for many years afterwards. The Government of 1688, not 

1 Cunningham, u. s., ii. 477-479. 2 lb., ii. 477. 

3 By this law 16s. a qr. was imposed on wheat as long as it was at and 
below 53s. 4d. , and 8s. a qr. when it was between 53s. 4d. and 80s. ; Adam 
Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk. IV., ch. v. (Vol. II., p. 113). 

4 Rogers, Hist. Agric, v. 276, and cf. ch. vii. of Vol. V. 

2 E 



434 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

content with the foregoing protective measure, added a 
bounty of 5s. per qr. upon the export of corn from Eng- 
land. 1 But the effect of this bounty was not felt for several 
years, for, fortunately, soon after the passing of the Bounty 
Act, a series of plentiful harvests occurred, and corn was 
very cheap. 2 There were consequently loud outcries from 
the landlords about agricultural distress, which merely meant 
that the people at large were enjoying cheap food. The 
aim of the bounty on corn had been to raise prices by 
encouraging its export, and thus rendering it scarcer and 
dearer in England. 3 As a matter of fact, it had the opposite 
effect, for it served as a premium upon which the wheat- 
grower could speculate, and thus induced him to sow a 
larger breadth of his land with wheat. The premium upon 
production caused producers to grow more than the market 
required, and so prices fell. 4 Thus, happily for the con- 
sumer, the Corn Laws and the bounty were harmless during 
the greater part of the eighteenth century, 5 for farmers 
competed one against the other sufficiently to keep down 
prices, and with a small population the supply was generally 
sufficient to meet the demand. But the inevitable Nemesis 
of protective measures came at the end of the century, 
when population was growing with unexampled rapidity, and 
required all the corn it could get. Then the prices of corn 
rose to a famine pitch, while the duty upon its importation, 
even when it was lowered, prevented it coming into the 
country in sufficient quantities. 

By a law of 1773, however, the importation of foreign 
wheat was allowed when English wheat was more than 48s. 
per qr. 6 In 1791 a duty of 24s. 3d. was imposed as 
long as English wheat was less than 50s. a qr. ; 1 if English 
wheat was over 50s. the duty was 2s. 6d. The landed 

1 The 1 William and Mary, § 1, c. 12. 

2 Rogers, Economic Interpretation, p. 377. 

3 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk. IV., ch. v. (Vol. II., 115). 

4 Rogers, Economic Interpretation, p. 378, who instances the similar 
result in the case of the premium on beet sugar abroad. 

5 /&.,p, 378. 

6 The 13 Geo. TIL, c. 43 ; cf. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk. IV., 
ch. v. (Vol. II., p. 119). 

7 By the 31 Geo. III., c. 30. 



MODERN AGRICULTURE 435 

interest, however, was not satisfied yet. In 1804 foreign 
corn was practically prohibited x from importation if English 
wheat was less than 63s. a qr. ; in 1815 the prohibition 
was extended 2 till the price of English wheat was 80s. a 
qr. Then came the agitations and riots of 1817-19, after 
which the country sank into despair till the formation 3 of 
the Anti-Corn Law League in 1839. During the operation 
of these laws the landlords received enormous rents, 4 so 
high, in fact, that with all the aid of artificial legislation, 
farmers, except in good years, could hardly pay them, and 
agriculture was often much distressed. 5 But meanwhile the 
mass of the people was frequently on the verge of starva- 
tion, and at length the country perceived that things could 
not be allowed to go on any longer in this way. The 
manufacturing capitalists of the day supported the leaders 
of the people in their agitation, for they hoped that cheap 
food might mean low wages. 6 By their aid the landed 
interest was overcome, and in 1846 the Corn Laws, by the 
efforts of Cobden and his followers, were finally repealed. 
Nevertheless the British farmer and his landlords, forgetting, 
it seems, the days when they got high prices by the starva- 
tion of the poor, still frequently clamour for the re-imposition 
of the incubus of protection. 

§ 245. Agriculture under Protection. 

These years of Protection (1812-1845) comprised, in 
fact," one of the most disastrous periods through which 
British agriculture has ever had to pass. The inflated 
prices created by the Continental War not only caused an 
enormous rise in rent, but also a more luxurious and com- 

1 By the 44 Geo. III., c. 109. 

2 By the 55 Geo. III., c. 26. By the 3 Geo. IV., c. 60, the price for duty 
was reduced to 70s. a qr. 

3 For this, see Morley's Life of Cobden, ch. vi. 

4 Porter, quoted above, p. 428. 

5 The distress of agriculturists in this period is carefully detailed in 
various Reports, and the whole subject has been ably dealt with by I, S 
Leadam in his book, What Protection does for the Farmer and Laboure 
(1893). For the period 1812-1845 see also Prothero, Pioneers of Englis 
Farming, p. 87 sqq. 

6 Cf Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 207. 



436 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

fortable mode of living among the higher agricultural classes ; 
but when the war was finally brought to a close by the 
Peace of 1815, there was a sudden fall in prices that caused 
widespread trouble. The majority of landowners refused 
to reduce their rents, and many farmers were in consequence 
ruined. Hence arose the cry for more stringent Protective 
laws, and these were duly passed. 1 Encouraged by these 
enactments, farmers went on growing more corn than was 
necessary, in hopes that the former high prices would now 
be kept up artificially ; and, of course, they were inevitably 
doomed to the disappointment that awaits all ill-considered 
legislation. Eent was paid, but it was paid out of capital, 
not out of profits ; and agricultural distress grew more and 
more bitter. Select Committees and Commissions sat to 
inquire into it in 1814, and in 1821 and 1822 ; they sat 
again in 1835 and 1836 ; and terrible evidence of the 
widespread ruin of many farmers was brought before them. 2 
It was shown that since 1790 rents had increased some 70 
per cent., and yet distress was prevalent in all agricultural 
districts. 3 The last ten years of this unfortunate period, 
however, were more prosperous than those which had gone 
before, partly because of the action of the New Poor Law 4 
and the Tithe Commutation Act, 5 but chiefly, no doubt, 
owing to the marked improvements that were made in 
farming. Of these improvements it is now time to speak. 

§ 246. Improvements in Agriculture. 

The advance made between the years 1812 and 1845 is 
remarkable, in view of the great distress which undoubtedly 
prevailed among agriculturists at the time. 6 The first, and 
possibly the most important, of these was the greater atten- 
tion paid to the drainage of agricultural land, a subject 

1 Especially in 1815 by the 55 George III., c. 26. 

2 This evidence is conveniently summarised in What Protection does for 
the Farmer and Labourer, by I. S. Leadam, pp. 5, 33, and passim. See also 
Prothero, Pioneers, p. 87. 

3 Prothero, u. s., p. 87. 4 The 4 and 5 William IV., c. 76 (1834). 

5 The 6 and 7 William IV., c. 71 (1836). 

6 See Prothero, Pioneers of English Farming, pp. 95, 96, for the fol- 
owing. 



MODERN AGRICULTURE 437 

discussed as far back as 1641 by Blith, and strongly re- 
commended by Arthur Young. One of the first farmers to 
appreciate the importance of proper drainage was James 
Elkington, a Warwickshire man, 1 whose services were so 
markedly useful to his county that the Government gave 
him a grant of £1000 in recognition thereof. But it was 
Smith of Deanston 2 w T ho proceeded in a really scientific 
manner, and from 1823 and 1834 onwards his suggestions 
were widely followed. The importance of the subject was 
recognised by Parliament, and loans for drainage purposes 
were allowed by the Act 3 of 1846. 

Next to drainage comes the introduction of science into 
the use and application of manures. The chemical nature 
of the various soils, and the fertilisers which are most suit- 
able for them, were now more carefully studied. From about 
1835 nitrate of soda and guano began to be used. 4 In 
1840, Liebig, the great German chemist, recommended the 
use of superphosphate of lime, and Sir J. B. Lawes in 
England showed how this could be obtained by dissolving 
bone-dust in sulphuric acid. 5 Then phosphates and am- 
moniacal manures were gradually introduced ; and marked 
strides were made by the beneficial action and inter-action 
of good drainage and suitable fertilising agents. Nor must 
we omit the advance made in agricultural implements and 
machines, such as Small's plough, the sub-soil plough, 
Meikle's threshing machine, and the drilling machine 6 — all 
of which have greatly assisted agricultural operations. 
More attention w T as also paid now to the proper cultivation 
of artificial grasses, agricultural plants, and the selection of 
seeds. The rearing and breeding of stock was carried on 
more scientifically, and the oil-cakes and other artificial 
foods, formerly introduced by Coke of Holkham, 7 were more 

1 Prothero, Pioneers of English Farming, p. 96. 

2 IK, p. 97. 3 lb., p. 98. 4 lb., p. 99. 

5 lb., p. 100. The value of bones for manure is said to have been dis- 
covered as early as 1772 by a Yorkshire foxhunter when clearing out his 
stables (Prothero, Pioneers, p. 80). According to Porter {Progress of the 
Nation, i. 149), bones were occasionally used for this purpose about 1800, 
but did not come into general use till 1820. 

6 Prothero, Pioneers of English Farming, p. 100. 

7 Prothero, Pioneers, p. 80. 



438 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

and more widely used for cattle. This general advance in 
care and skill was greatly assisted by the work of the Royal 
Agricultural Society, which was founded in 1838, and held 
its first meeting the following year in Oxford, 1 the home of 
movements which have usually been of a somewhat dif- 
ferent character from the operations of agriculture. The 
greater facilities of transit afforded by the introduction of 
railways, canals, and steam navigation should also be noted 
as contributing to the success of the farmer, by enabling 
him to bring his produce more readily to market, and it 
became no longer necessary for one parish to starve, while 
another in a different part of the country had to allow its 
surplus produce to rot. 2 

Altogether, therefore, English agriculture made great 
strides in the years before the repeal of the Corn Laws 
(1846) ; and although after that repeal many persons pre- 
dicted ruin to the farmer, he continued to prosper. The 
fact was that the enormous development of trade and 
population, the stimulus given to all kinds of commerce by 
the use of steam, not only as a locomotive power but also 
for driving machinery, and the greater interchange of pro- 
ducts due to modern facilities of transit, all had a beneficial 
effect upon the farmer. He shared also, in another way, 
in the general increase of trade and prosperity, for the 
population of England since 1840 has not only increased 
in actual numbers, but has taken to eating far more of the 
farmers' produce than ever it did before. The consump- 
tion of butter per head of the United Kingdom was only 
1-05 lbs. in 1840, whereas in 1892 it was 614 lbs.; of 
cheese the figures are 0*92 lbs. in the earlier date, and 
5*86 lbs. in the later ; of bacon 0T lbs., as compared with 
13*11 lbs. in 1892. 3 Of course large quantities of produce 
now come from abroad, but, even allowing for this, it will 
be seen that a tremendous increase must have taken place 
in the consumption of the produce of British farms. In 
fact, English agriculture was in a very flourishing condition 
in the " fifties and sixties," reaching its most favourable point 

1 Prothero, Pioneers, p. 101. 2 lb., 78. 

8 Leadam, What Protection does for the Farmer and Labourer, p. 81. 



MODERN AGRICULTURE 439 

about the time of the Franco-German war (1871-73). But 
after that it began to decline, and has continued to do so 
for a period of twenty years, though it is to be hoped 
that now (1895) the depression has passed its most acute 
stage. 

§ 247. The Depression in Modern Agriculture. 

The causes of this modern collapse in English agriculture 
are many and varied, and it must be remembered that to 
a large extent agriculture has only suffered in common with 
the other industries of the country, from which it is im- 
possible to separate it altogether. Yet, we may distinguish 
two causes, which, more than any others, have tended to 
this depression, and these are, in the first part of the 
period, unfavourable seasons, and, in the second, low prices 
and foreign competition. The autumn of 1872 was incle- 
ment, and the following spring unfavourable, so that the 
good effects of the fine harvest weather of 1873 were 
neutralised. 1 The year 1874 was the last of a cycle of 
prosperous seasons. From 1875 to 1877 the farmer had 
to contend against a succession of bleak springs and rainy 
summers, 2 — weather that produced short cereal crops of 
inferior quality, causing mildew in wheat, mould in hops, 
and blight in other cases, while sheep-rot and cattle disease 
became very prevalent. The British farmer, thus enfeebled 
by bad seasons, was further attacked by an alarming increase 
in foreign competition, due partly to the increase of the 
wheat area in India and America, and perhaps even more 
largely to the constantly growing facilities for transport of 
agricultural produce from distant lands. Meanwhile, his 
own harvests were going from bad to worse. The summer 
of 1879, sunless and ungenial, caused the worst harvest of 
the century ; and though since 1882 the seasons have been 
less uniformly unfavourable, the effects of the previous lean 
years have been hard to neutralise. 3 

Moreover, the stress of foreign competition has been very 

1 Prothero, in Diet. Pol. Econ., s. v. Agricultural Depression, Vol. I., 
p. 564. 2 lb. 

3 For the above, see Prothero, u. s. 



440 



INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 



severe. Between 1866 and 1883 the values of agricul- 
tural imports from abroad rose from £77,069,431 to double 
that figure, i.e., £157,520,797. Again, in 1851, the 
supply of wheat was 317 lbs. per head per annum for a 
population of some 27 millions, and it cost £53,500,000; 
but in 1885 the supply was 400 lbs. per head for some 
36 million people, and yet the cost was reduced to 
£43,7 00 ; 000. No doubt the consumers, as a whole, pro- 
fited by the low price of bread, but, nevertheless, the agri- 
culturist was being steadily ruined ; and it has been 
seriously doubted by some economists whether the wider 
interests of the nation at large do not suffer when the 
cheapness of food proves so disastrous to a respectable and 
important class. 1 The fall in prices may be further seen 
from the following table 2 : — 



Year. 


Wheat, 


Barley, 


Cattle, 
per stone 


Sheep, 
per stone 




per qr. 


per qr. 


of 8 lbs. 


of 8 lbs. 




s. d. 


s. d. 


s. d. s. d. 


8. d. s. d. 


1873 


58 8 


40 5 


5 lto6 4 


5 8 to 6 11 


1883 


41 7 


31 10 


4 3 „ 6 1 


5 6 „7 3 


1893 


26 4 


25 7 


2 10 „ 4 9 


3 8 „ 5 5 


1894 


22 10 


24 6 


2 6 „ 4 5 


3 8 „ 6 1 


1895 (Sept. 28) 


23 


24 8 


2 9 „ 4 6 


4 1 „ 5 9 



Other produce has fallen in proportion. Thousands of 
farmers have been ruined, agriculture generally has suffered 
a severe and prolonged depression, and much arable land 
has been laid down again as pasture, 3 while some has gone 
altogether out of cultivation. 4 Meanwhile political false 
prophets have been going about with their usual nostrums, 
and the flags of Protection and even of Bi-metallism are 
being waved before the bewildered eyes of the British 
farmer, as if they were signals of salvation. 5 

1 Prothero, Diet. Pol. Econ., i. 565, from which the above figures are 
taken. 

2 See Hazell's Annual for 1895, p. 15, and 1896, p. 11. 

3 See the Agricultural Returns. The arable land of 1893 was about 
2,000,000 acres less than in 1873 (c/. also Hazell's Annual, 1895). 

4 Notably in Essex. 

5 This sentence was first written in 1890. There is no reason to alter it 
in 1895. 



MODERN AGRICULTURE 441 

§ 248. The Causes of the Depression. 

Now it is perfectly obvious, to an impartial observer of 
economic facts, that an industry, so flourishing as English 
agriculture was not very many years ago, could not have 
suffered so severe a collapse unless there had been some 
great underlying cause, besides the ordinary complaints 
of bad harvests and foreign competition already referred 
to. These must have due weight given them, but bad 
harvests are not peculiar to England, and foreign com- 
petition, however keen it may be, has first to overstep a 
very considerable natural margin of protection in the cost 
of carriage. It costs, for instance, according to a high 
American authority, 9s. per quarter to transport American 
wheat from Chicago to London. 1 It is clear that besides 
these, there must have been other influences of consider- 
able importance to cause English agriculture to have been, 
in spite of its apparent prosperity, in so insecure a position 
that it should have sunk to the depressed condition in which 
it even now remains. We have not to look far for the 
•causes. There are several, and one among them is the 
lack of agricultural capital. 

But how, it may naturally be asked, has it come about 
that the English farmer, after the very favourable period 
before the depression, should thus suffer from a lack of 
capital, a lack which renders it almost impossible for him 
to work his land properly ? The answer is simple. His 
capital has been greatly decreased, surely, though not 
always slowly, by an enormous increase in his rent. The 
landlords of the eighteenth century, it has been said, 
perhaps somewhat too severely, made the English farmer 
the foremost agriculturist in the world, but their successors 
of the nineteenth have ruined him by their extortions. 2 
Such, at any rate, is the verdict of eminent agricultural 
authorities ; and landowners have been compelled, for 
their own sake, to reduce the exorbitant rents which they 

1 Mr David Wells, quoted by Thorold Rogers, in The Relations of Economic 
Science to Social and Political Action, p. 12. Mr Edward Atkinson puts it 
at lis. This is about |d. per ton per mile. 

2 Thorold Rogers, Economic Interpretation of History, p. 182. 



442 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

received in former years. Unfortunately, too, the attention 
of other classes of the community has been, till lately, 
diverted from the condition of our agriculture by the 
prosperity of our manufactures. But these two branches of 
industry, the manufacturing and the agricultural, are closely 
interdependent, and must suffer or prosper together. It 
is possible, also, that there are certain economic theories 
which have helped the decline of English agriculture. 
They are the Ricardian theory of rent, and the dubious 
" law of diminishing returns." 1 They have made many 
people think that this decline was inevitable, and have 
diverted their attention from a very important, though 
not the only, cause of the trouble — namely, the increase of 
rent. But putting the possible effect of these theories 
aside, we may employ ourselves more profitably in looking 
at the facts of the case. It has been mentioned before, 
that in Tull's time, at the beginning of the eighteenth 
century, the average rent of agricultural land was 7s. per 
acre, and by Young's time, towards the close of the century, 
it had risen to 10s. per acre. 2 Diffused agricultural skill 
caused an increase of profits, and the hope of sharing in 
these profits led farmers to give competitive rents, which 
afterwards the landlords proceeded to exact in full, and 
frequently to increase. The farmers were enabled to pay 
higher rents by the low rate of wages paid to their 
labourers, 3 a rate which the justices tended to keep down 
by their assessments. In 1799 we find land paying nearly 
20s. an acre; in 1812 the same land pays over 25s. ; in 
1830, again, it was still at about 25s., but by 1850 it had 
risen to 38s. 8d., which was about four times Arthur Young's 
average. 4 Indeed, £2 per acre was not an uncommon rent 
for good land a few years ago (1885), 5 the average increase 
of English rent being no less than 2 6 J per cent, between 

1 1 have dealt with them in an article in the Westminster Review, 
December 1888, but perhaps their importance is overrated. 

2 Both Tull and Young are quoted by Rogers, Economic Interpretation of 
History, p. 176. 

3 lb., p. 179 ; and cf. Six Centuries, p. 492. 

4 Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices, v. 29. 

5 W. E. Bear, The British Farmer and his Competitors, p. 31. The cal- 
culation as to the increase in rent is Mr James Howard's. 



MODERN AGRICULTURE 443 

1854 and 1879. Now, such rent as this was enormous, 
and could only be paid in very good years. In ordinary 
years, and still more in bad years, it was paid out of the 
farmer's capital. 1 This process of payment was facilitated 
by the fact that the farmer of this century did not keep 
his accounts properly, a fruitful source of eventual evil 
frequently commented upon by agricultural authorities, 2 and 
obvious enough to anyone who knows many farmers person- 
ally ; and, also, by the other fact, that even when the 
tenant perceived that he was working his farm at a loss, 
the immediate loss (of some 10 or 15 per cent. 3 ) involved in 
getting out of his holding was heavy enough in most cases 
to induce him to submit to a rise in his rent rather than 
lose visibly so much of his capital. 4 

The invisible process, however, was equally certain, if not 
so immediate. The result has been that the average capital 
per acre now employed in agriculture is only about £4 or 
£5, instead of at least £10, as it ought to be, 5 and the 
farmer cannot afford to pay for a sufficient supply of labour, 
so that the agricultural population is seriously diminishing. 
Nothing in modern agriculture is so serious as this decline 
of the rural population, and we must, further on, devote a 
few words to a consideration of the agricultural labourer and 
the conditions of his existence. But before doing so it may 
be well to point out, for fear of misconception, that the high 
rent of English agricultural land is not the only cause of 

1 Prothero, on Agricultural Depression, in Diet. Pol. Econ., i. 564, points 
out that even after 1874, "the last of a cycle of prosperous years," rent 
continued to rise for two years longer, and that farmers have lost their 
capital. 

2 Rogers, Six Centuries, 471, and Relations of Economic Science, p. 17. 

3 Rogers, Relations of Economic Science, p. 17. 

4 The state of the case is very clearly and forcibly put by Thorold 
Rogers in the pamphlet just quoted, p. 18. 

5 Tb., p. 17. Elsewhere Rogers (Six Centuries, p. 471) remarks that 
Arthur Young, even in his time, set down £6 an acre as the minimum 
capital necessary for successful agriculture, which is equivalent to more 
like £12 at the present time. Rogers also mentions that on certain land 
known to him the capital was (in 1878) under £6 an acre. My own calcula- 
tions on this head will be found in the Economist of April 28th, 1888, and 
they coincide closely, though independently, with the statements made by 
Professor Rogers. 



444 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

the depression. It is a very important cause, and operates 
in more ways than are usually seen on the surface, nor is it 
any argument to say, as some have done, that because land 
will not pay for the expense of farming, even when it is let 
rent free, that therefore the former high rent had nothing to 
do with the matter. For when a farmer has lost all his 
capital in paying rent when he was not earning it, he is not 
anxious to continue the experiment even at a reduction of 
that rent, especially when he knows that, if successful, he 
will only have to pay more rent again in the future. But, 
apart from this, the causes of the depression are manifold 
and various. Almost chief among them may be placed a 
certain lack of adaptability to changed circumstances which 
has characterised the British farmer as compared with his 
foreign competitors. This is very noticeable in the case of 
dairy farming, where foreign producers have rapidly over- 
taken our own countrymen in supplying the British home 
market. Many an English farmer has gone on growing 
wheat for years after it was obviously a loss to him, when 
he might gradually have introduced some other crop. Again, 
he has neglected dairy farming, or only carried it on on 
unscientific principles, while foreigners have been scientifi- 
cally perfecting their methods. He has certainly despised 
the smaller industries of the farm, such as poultry-rearing 
and egg-producing, 1 so that our home market is now largely 
stocked with fowls and eggs from France, Germany, Den- 
mark, and even Italy. Again, as a nation, we have paid 
too little heed to agricultural education, and though so- 
called " technical instruction " is now given, it is conducted 
in many places in a most chaotic manner, and money is 
lavishly wasted with the minimum of result. Dairy schools 
are certainly at length being established, but not before 
they had become familiar to every Danish cowherd and 
Danish butter was ousting our own from the home market. 
Here, as elsewhere in our educational system, the State has 
neglected duties which every other great European nation 

1 It is only in the last two years (1895) that the farmers of a certain 
parish which I know well in Wiltshire have paid attention to their poultry, 
by placing fowl-houses for them in the stubble after harvest. 



MODERN AGRICULTURE 445* 

has long since taken upon itself, so that our British farmers 
are, like our British mechanics, the most sensible and yet 
the most ignorant of their kind. 

But to enumerate all the causes of the present agricul- 
tural depression would exhaust both the patience of the 
reader and the industry of the writer, more especially as 
many of them are inextricably implicated in the general 
conditions of English industry. 1 Those already mentioned 
— high rents and low prices, foreign competition and domes-, 
tic carelessness, lack of capital and want of education — are 
possibly among the chief. Everyone who knows much 
about agriculture will add others from his own experience, 
and those who know but little will add still more. It is, 
therefore, perhaps better to consider a subject which is 
closely connected with them, and of dangerous importance 
to the nation at large. I refer to the serious depopulation 
of the rural districts. 

§ 249. The Labourer and the Land. 

It has been previously mentioned 2 that the Industrial 
Revolution was accompanied by an equally important re-, 
volution in agriculture : the main features of the agrarian 
revolution being the consolidation of small into large farms, 
the introduction of new methods and machinery, the en- 
closure of common fields and waste lands, and discontinu- 
ance of the old open-field system, and, finally, the divorce 
of the labourer from the land. The consolidation of farms, 
reduced the number of farmers, while the enclosures drove 
the labourers off the land, for it became almost impossible 
for them to exist on their low wages now that their old 
rights of keeping small cattle and geese upon the commons, 
of having a bit of land round their cottages, and other 
privileges, were ruthlessly taken from them. 3 They have 
retreated in large numbers into the towns, and taken up 
other pursuits, or helped to swell the ranks of English 
pauperism. Before the Industrial and Agrarian Revolu- 

1 See Prothero's excellent article in Vol. I. of Palgrave's Dictionary of 
Political Economy. 

2 Above, pp. 343, 430. 

3 Above, pp. 335, 408; and Prothero, Pioneers, dbc, p. 73. 



446 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

tion, Arthur Young, 1 in 1769, estimated that out of a 
total population of 8,500,000, the agricultural class, 
" farmers (whether freeholders or leaseholders), their ser- 
vants and labourers," numbered no less than 2,800,000 — 
i.e., over one-fourth of the total population — and, with others 
interested in agriculture, the number was 3,600,000. The 
number of those engaged in manufactures of all kinds he puts 
at 3,000,000. His figures may be taken as substantially 
correct, though perhaps not as accurate as a modern census. 
Now let us look at the agricultural population of more 
recent years. In 1871 the number of wage-earners in 
agriculture was just under one million (996,642) in 
England and Wales. In 1881 it had declined further to 
890,174, and in 1891 it had again declined 2 to just 
over three-quarters of a million (798,912). The propor- 
tion that these wage-earners bear to the class of agricul- 
turists, as a whole, is 73 per cent., so that they are quite 
adequately representative of the general rural population. 
This decline in absolute numbers in twenty years is start- 
ling enough, but it is still more so when we take the 
proportion of the numbers to the total population of 
England and Wales, and find that the percentage of 
agricultural wage-earners was only 4*34 in 1871, 3*43 
in 1881, and as low as 2*75 in 1891. Even if we include, 
besides wage-earners, the whole class of agriculturists, we 
shall find that the proportion has sunk from the one person 
in four employed in agriculture in Arthur Young's time to 
more like one in twenty -four. There is in these figures 
much cause for uneasiness, not only for the economist, but 
for the patriot and for the politician. Nor is that uneasiness 
lessened by the fact that the same phenomenon of rural 
depopulation may also be seen in other European countries. 3 
The modern rush to the towns is not a healthy sign, nor 
can any nation rest on a firm and secure basis unless, to use 
a rustic metaphor, its roots strike deep into its native soil. 

1 Quoted above, p. 334. 

2 The figures are from the Official Reports of the Census, and are con- 
veniently summarised in Hazell's Annual for 1895. 

3 See E. G. Ravenstein's interesting paper in Vol. LII. (1889), p. 241, of 
the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. 



MODERN AGRICULTURE 447 

§ 250. The Condition of the Labourer. 

But not only have the numbers of the agricultural popu- 
lation decreased, but the labourer no longer has, as a rule, 
any share in the land. Certainly the agricultural labourer, 
at any rate in the South of England, was much better of! 
in the middle of the eighteenth century than his descendants 
were in the middle of the nineteenth. In fact, in 1850 or 
so, wages were in many places practically lower in purchas- 
ing power, and not much higher in actual coin, than 
they were in 1750. But meanwhile almost every necessary 
of life, except bread, has increased in cost, and more 
especially reut has risen, while on the other hand the 
labourer, as we have seen, has lost many of his old 
privileges, for formerly his common rights, besides provid- 
ing him with fuel, enabled him to keep cows or pigs and 
poultry on the waste, and sheep on the fallows and stubbles, 
while he could generally grow his own vegetables and 
garden produce. All these things formed a substantial 
addition to his nominal wages. From 1750 or so to about 
1800 his nominal wages averaged 7s. 6d. or 10s. a week; 
in 1850 they only averaged 1 10s. or 12s., although in the 
latter period his nominal wages represented all he actually 
received, while in the former they represented only part of 
his total income. Since 1850, however, even agricultural 
wages have risen, the present average being about 13 s. a 
week. 2 This, of course, represents in rural districts far more 
than the same amount of wages would in a town, since the 
agricultural labourer of to-day has been enabled to obtain 
allotments for his own use in many places, and only pays 
a low rent for his cottage. But even then it does not 
represent a large income, and though there is more than 
one honest South Country labourer who has brought up a 
family respectably on 10s. a week, 3 it can hardly be 

1 Cf. the figures in Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 510. 

2 The average weekly wages as based upon thirty-eight estimates of the 
mean rate for all the districts inquired into by the Assistant Commissioners 
on Agricultural Labour in the Labour Commission of 1891 was about 13s. 5d. 
per week. The average rate ascertained by the Richmond Commission of 
1879-81 was 13s. Id., and the estimate for 1867-70 was 12s. 3d. per week. 

3 I am speaking from my personal acquaintance with such. 



448 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

contended that a higher rate of payment would not have 
been better both for himself and for his employers. At the 
same time, it cannot be denied the general condition of the 
agricultural labourer is far better now than it was twenty, 
or even fifty, years ago. The hours of work have been 
lessened, and machinery, although it has caused displace- 
ment in some cases, has yet relieved the labourer of much 
of the severe work which he had then to perform. In many 
counties the wives of the labourers have been entirely 
emancipated from field work for many years past, though, of 
course, in many counties also, they do light field work at 
harvest time. Greater opportunities for education have 
been given, and the dwellings of rural labourers, with all 
their defects, are generally better now than they used to 
be. " The labourer of the present day," it is said, " who is 
better fed, better clothed, better housed, than his father was, 
may not be fully conscious of the improvement that has 
taken place, because his ideas have expanded, and his wants, 
like those of persons in every other class, have grown ; but 
none the less he lives in less discomfort, his toil is less 
severe, his children have a better prospect before them, and 
opportunities which he himself never enjoyed." * 

Such is a fair, though not a roseate, statement of the 
present position, and at first glance it may seem satisfactory. 
But when we come to consider that, after all, the present 
tolerable position of the agricultural labourer is an improve- 
ment only when compared with the depth of degradation 
reached about the middle of the nineteenth century, and 
that his condition had till then been steadily declining, we 
may well stop and ask ourselves whether there is much 
cause for congratulation in the fact that the agricultural 
labourer of the end of the nineteenth century is not much 
worse off than he was a hundred or a hundred and fifty 
years ago. Considering the vast improvement that has 
taken place in the whole of our social and economic 
standard of living, and in the opportunities which are now 

1 Report of Mr W. C. Little, Assistant Agricultural Commissioner, in his 
General Report on the Agricultural Labourer to the Labour Commission 
(June 20, 1894). 



MODERN AGRICULTURE 449 

opened up by modern culture, it is doubtful whether we 
can honestly say that the agricultural labourer has had his 
fair share of them. Statisticians rejoice because he has for 
some time no longer retrograded, but has even advanced ; 
but this is but a poor advance compared with that of the 
nation as a whole. However, for whatever advance that 
has taken place, we shall do well to be thankful, for a sturdy 
and contented peasantry, where it exists, is the best back- 
bone for a progressive nation. 

The rise, such as it is, is due, among other causes, to the 
formation of Trades Unions, the leader and promoter of 
which among agricultural labourers was Joseph Arch. This 
active and energetic man, who has sat in more than one 
Parliament, was born in 1826, and in his youth and middle 
age saw the time when agricultural labour was at its lowest 
depth. Not only were wages low — being about 10s. or 
lis. a week — but the evils of the factory system of child 
labour had been transferred to the life of the fields. Phil- 
anthropists seem to have overlooked the disgraceful condi- 
tions of the system of working in agricultural gangs, under 
which a number of children and young persons were collected 
on hire from their parents by some overseer or contractor, 
who took them about the district at certain seasons of the 
year to work on the land of those farmers who wished 
to employ them. The persons composing the gang were 
exposed to every inclemency of the weather, without having 
homes to return to in the evening, people of both sexes 
being housed while under their contract in barns, without 
any thought of decency or comfort, while the children often 
suffered from all the coarse brutalities that suggested them- 
selves to the overseer of their labour. 1 Their pay was of 

1 For gang labour see the Report (Reports, xii., 1843) of the Committee 
of 1843 on this subject. The worst evils are said to have been corrected 
in 1816 by the 56 Geo. III., c. 139 (Cunningham, Growth of Industry, ii. 
653), but cf. Rogers, Six Centuries, pp. 511, 512. 

The following extract from one of the Rev. S. Baring- Gould's novels 
gives some idea of the conditions of gang labour. I am assured by the 
author that he derived the incident from a reliable authority in the district 
where it happened : "Twice or thrice the wheat had to be hoed, and the 
hoers were women. Over them the farmers set a ' ganger ' armed with an 
ox-goad, who thrust on the lagging women with a prod between the 
shoulder-blades." — Baring-Gould, Cheap Jack Zita, p. 214. 

2 F 



45o INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

course miserable, though gangs flourished at a time when 
farmers and landlords were making huge profits. But the 
degrading practice of cheap gang-labour was defended as 
being necessary to profitable agriculture ; which means that 
tenants were too cowardly or too obtuse to resist rents 
which they could not pay except by employing pauperised 
and degraded labour. Amid times like these Joseph Arch 
grew up, and the seed of Trade Unionism was sown, but it 
was not till 1872 (at which time it will be remembered 
that British farmers were doing very well) 1 that the agita- 
tion was begun which resulted in the formation of the 
National Agricultural Labourers' Union. The difficulties of 
organising the down- trodden labourers were enormous, but 
they were at length overcome by the leaders of the agitation, 
and their efforts have already done much to improve the 
material condition of their members. Wages have decidedly 
risen since the agitation began, but even now they certainly 
cannot be called high. 

§251. The Present Condition of British Agriculture. 

It remains to notice briefly the causes which are still 
influencing our agricultural industry, and to point out in 
what direction we may expect a revival from the present 
state of depression. Besides the fact of the increase of 
rents up to 1870 or 1875, we notice an increase of the 
foreign competition already alluded to — an increase which 
is of comparatively recent date. Our competitors are mainly 
Russia, America, and last, but by no means least, India. 2 
At the time of the Crimean War, and for some years subse- 
quently, Russian competition ceased to exist. Even when 
it began again, it was not very serious as long as it stood 
alone, for America had not yet entered the field, and was 
prevented from doing so by the sanguinary struggles of the 
Civil War. High prices for grain 3 prevailed, therefore, till 
some time after America had ceased her internal conflict, 
and it was only quite recently that much grain was grown 
for export in India. But since 1870 or so England has 

1 Above, p. 438. 2 See the Agricultural Returns for recent years. 

3 Aided by the discovery of gold in California and Australia. 



MODERN AGRICULTURE 451 

been supplied with grain from these three great agricultural 
countries, and the English farmer, no longer buoyed up at 
the expense of the rest of the community by protective 
measures, has found it impossible to grow wheat at a profit 
under the old rents. The consequence has been the ruin 
of many farmers, and a terrible loss of income for all classes 
in any way connected with agriculture. 1 But at the same 
time rents have decreased very slowly in spite of the fre- 
quent stories that are heard of wholesale reductions by 
sympathetic landlords. This may be seen from the official 
returns. The annual value of lands assessed under 

Schedule A in the United Kingdom was highest in 1879-80, 
when it was £69,548,793. It had decreased to £63,268,079 
in 1885-86, and still further 2 declined to £57,694,820 in 
1890-91. But it is surprising to find that even this latter 
iigure is higher than the gross assessment 3 of 1852-53, 
before the Russian War, while, on the other hand, land is 
not worth nearly so much to farm as it was then, so that 
it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the fall in rents 
has not been so great as it should have been in proportion 
to the fall in the profits of the farmer. 

In course of time it is certain that the economic action 
of supply and demand will bring rents down to something 
like their commercial value, as, indeed, it has been rapidly 
doing in some places lately (1895) ; meanwhile the English 
landlords, as an eminent agriculturist remarks, have the 
choice between allowing their old tenants to be ruined first, 
and then accepting reduced rents, or granting reductions 
soon enough to save men in whom they have hitherto had 
some confidence as tenants. 4 It will be necessary also to 
make important changes in the laws and customs of land 

1 It was estimated by Sir James Caird (Evidence before the Commission 
on Depression in Trade in 1886) that the loss of the agricultural community 
as a whole in annual income was £42,800,000 as compared with 1876. 
(C. 4715, Qu. 7673, and f. 7677, 7742, 7785). 

2 See Bear, The British Farmer and his Competitors, pp. 9, 10. 

3 The assessment for Great Britain under Schedule B was £46,571,887. 
A change in the assessment for Ireland renders the exact comparison 
difficult, but it is obvious that, even allowing for Ireland, there has not 
been so great a fall as might have been expected. 

4 W. E. Bear, u. s. , p. 12. 



452 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

tenure, so that our farmers may have complete security for 
their capital invested in improvements, and freedom of 
enterprise {e.g., in cropping and tilling), in order that they 
may do their best with the land. An extended system of 
small holdings and allotments 1 (which are fortunately 
increasing in spite of high rents), guaranteed by a thorough 
measure of Tenant Right, together with free trade in land 
as well as other commodities, would do much to place 
moderate farms within the reach of industrious and thrifty 
yeomen and labourers. Greater facilities for transit, in- 
cluding the encouragement of light railways and rural 
tram lines, together with the abolition of the system of 
preferential railway rates, would enable producers to put 
their produce with greater ease upon the home market ; 
for the requirements of the English nation guarantee an 
enormous and steady demand at home for every scrap of 
food-stuff that the land is capable of producing. The 
farmer is slow to adapt himself to changed conditions, 
but a profitable future is yet open to him, even if he 
gives up wheat-growing, and betakes himself more to dairy- 
farming, market-gardening, and what may be termed the 
minor branches of agriculture. But it may not be neces- 
sary for him to give up wheat altogether, since foreign 
farmers are beginning to find out that they cannot put 
wheat on the English market at the present low prices. 
In course of time the nation will probably perceive that 
it is desirable, and that ultimately it will be profitable, to 
recall capital and labour back to the land which it is 
evident that they have left ; and that it is the height of 
economic folly to rely, as some do, upon the extension of 
our manufacturing industries to counteract agricultural 
depression. Prosperous agriculture means for us pros- 
perous manufactures, and from an economic point of view 

1 The steady increase in allotments is shown by the figures of British 
allotments under one acre :— In 1873, 246,398 ; in 1888, 357,795 ; in 1890, 
455,005. Of these, the greater number (441,024 in 1890) were in England. 
Small holdings under fifty acres, and other than allotments, have also in- 
creased since 1875 (see Hazell's Annual, 1895). Mr W. O. Little, in the 
Report above referred to (Royal Commission on Labour, June 20, 1894), 
states that the rentals of allotments are very high, as everyone knows 
who has had experience of their working. 



MODERN AGRICULTURE 453 

the interests of the plough and the loom are identical. 
Neither can be served by protective tinkering. Reforms of 
a totally different character are needed, foremost among 
which is a widespread reduction of rent, and a general re- 
arrangement of the relations between landlord and tenant, 1 
together with the adoption of the best methods, both in 
education and in agricultural practice, of our Continental 
and foreign competitors. It is on the face of it ridiculous 
to assert that, with an unequalled demand in the home 
market for all he can produce, the English farmer cannot 
find some means of making the land pay, and pay well. 
But before he can do this he must spend more capital upon 
it than he has lately been able to afford. 

1 Gf. W. E. Bear, The British Farmer and his Competitors, pp. 12-17, 
and throughout the book generally. For the advantages possessed by the 
British farmer (the chief of which is the unequalled home market), cf. 
Mr James Howard's remarks quoted on p. 18 of the same book. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

MODERN INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND 

§ 252. The Growth of our Industry. 

We have now traced the industrial growth of England 
from the diffused beginnings of manufactures and agricul- 
ture in primitive times to the more settled period of the 
manorial system, and have seen how, afterwards, towns 
gradually grew up, commerce extended, and markets arose, 
while manufactures became organised in various centres 
and regulated by guilds. We have seen that for several 
centuries the backbone of our national wealth was the 
export of wool, but that in course of time we ceased to 
export it, and worked it up into cloth ourselves, thereby 
gaining great national wealth. We have seen, too, how our 
foreign trade, after its petty beginnings in the Middle Ages, 
made a new advance in the buccaneering days of the 
Elizabethan sea captains, and then rapidly developed, by 
means of the various great trading Companies, till England 
became commercially supreme throughout the world. From 
commercial beginnings we traced the rise of our Indian 
Empire, and the growth of the American colonies. Mean- 
while, at home, there came an Industrial Revolution, which, 
happening as it did at the moment that was politically 
most favourable to its growth, gave England a most 
advantageous start over other European nations in manu- 
facturing industries of all kinds, and thus enabled her to 
endure successfully the enormous burdens of the great 
Continental war. Now comes a time of still greater pro- 
gress, economic as well as commercial, for the old restrictive 
barriers to trade are to be swept away, and a new economic 
policy is to be inaugurated. 

454 




Scale.of EnglishMiles 
o 10 zo 30 40 so 75 100 



Manufacturing districts are shown by slanting lines ; large manufacturing 
towns by black circles , and the most populous counties are coloured darker than 
the others. It will be noticed that population since 1750 has shifted very much to 
the North and North West of England, whilst manufactures are far more con- 
centrated than formerly. (Compare the Map opposite page 350) 



MODERN INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND 455 



§ 253. State of Trade in 1820. 

If we now endeavour to gain some idea of the trade of 

the country soon after the war, we may look for a moment 

at its condition 1 in 1820, just before Free Trade measures 

were begun. The official value 2 of the total imports was 

declared to be £32,438,650, while the exports amounted to 

£48,951,537. This gives a total trade of only £3, 15s. 

per head of the population then existing, 3 whereas in 1890 

the proportion was no less than £18, 6 s. per head. 4 The 

tonnage of shipping entering and leaving our harbours was 

about 4,000,000 tons, of which 2,648,000 tons belonged to 

the United Kingdom and its dependencies. 5 Steamers were, 

of course, as yet unknown. Professor Leone Levi calculates 

the trade of the country at not more than one-eighth or 

one-ninth of what it is at the present time. The wealth 

and comfort accessible to the people in general was much 

more limited, the consumption of tea, for instance, being 

only 1 lb. 4 oz. per head, and of sugar 18 lbs. a head. 6 In 

fact, if we compare the £327,880,676 worth of our exports 

in 1890 with the £48,951,537 worth in 1820, we see at 

once how gigantic has been the growth of our trade. In 

1891, again, the imports 7 were £435,691,279, which is 

more than twelve times their value in 1820. But even at 

the beginning of the century England was far ahead of her 

1 It may be well to tabulate briefly the figures of trade for the forty 
years previous to 1820 (Palgrave's Diet. Pol. Econ.. i. p. 344) : — 



Yeae. 


Imports. 


Exports. 


TOT^L. 


1770 

1780 
1790 
1S00 
1810 


11,002.000 
9,956.000 
16,398.000 
23,25S.00O 
39,302,000 


12,142.000 
11,363,000 
17,636.000 
34.382.000 
48,439.000 


23, 144,000 
21.319,000 
34.034,000 
62,640,000 
87,741,000 



2 Accounts and Papers, 1833, xli. 48. 

3 The population of the United Kingdom in 1821 included 12,000,236 in 
England and Wales, and 6,802,000 in Ireland— a total of nearly 19,000,000. 
Accounts and Papers, 1852-53, lxxxv. 23. 

4 The calculation is in the article Commerce in Palgrave's Diet. Pol. 
Econ.,?- 339, Vol. I. 

5 Leone Levi, Hist. British Commerce, p. 151. 6 lb., p. 151. 
7 See the article on Commerce in Diet. Pol. Econ., i. 339. 



456 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

old rival France, for French imports were only worth 
£8,000,000 in 1815, and her exports only about double 
that amount, or less than half England's exports, which in 
that year rose to over £58,624,550 (official value). 1 

§ 254. The Beginnings of Free Trade, 

The year 1820 has been chosen for comparison, not 
merely as showing the condition of our trade at that time, 
but for the great enunciation of Free Trade principles 
which it witnessed. The old Mercantile system was break- 
ing up, and the ideas of Adam Smith were bearing fruit. 
A new era of commercial policy was beginning. For in 
that year the London merchants in the Chamber of Com- 
merce formulated their famous Petition praying that every 
restrictive regulation of trade, not imposed on account of 
the revenue, together with all duties of a protective char- 
acter, might be at once repealed. 2 At last the teachings of 
economists were being put into practice by men of business. 
The Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce sent up a similar 
petition ; a Committee was appointed in Parliament to 
investigate the wishes of the petitioners of the Northern 
and the Southern capital ; and it brought in a report 3 
thoroughly in agreement with the Free Trade principles of 
the merchants. From that time onward these principles 
were gradually, but more and more widely, adopted. 4 In 
the following year Mr Huskisson, the President of the Board 
of Trade, proposed the first measures of commercial reform, 
and one by one the restrictions upon our trade were 
removed. The most important of the new measures was 
the gradual alteration 5 of the old Navigation Laws, finally 
culminating in their total repeal in 1849. It was also 
Huskisson who, in 1823, passed a "Reciprocity of Duties 

1 This is for the U. K., but of course the greater part came from Eng- 
land ; Accounts and Papers, 1830, xxvii. 211, and, for French imports, cf. 
Levi, u. s., p. 152. 

2 Leone Levi, History of British Commerce, pp. 150-153. 

3 The report was presented on July 18th, 1820. 

4 An excellent short account of the change of English commercial policy 
from 1815 to 1860 is given in Prof. Bastable's Commerce of Nations, ch. vi. 

5 By a series of five acts, all passed in 1822, viz. : the 3 Geo. IV., c. 41, 
c. 42, c. 43, c. 44, c. 45 ; cf. Craik, British Commerce, iii. 234, 235. 



MODERN INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND 457 

Bill," by which * English and foreign ships had equal advan- 
tages in England whenever foreign nations allowed the same 
to English vessels in their ports. The commerce of our 
colonies was thus thrown open, under certain restrictions, to 
other nations. In order to promote free trade in our manu- 
facturing industries, he reduced the duties on silk and wool 2 
in 1824, and in the same year the Act fixing wages for silk 
weavers was repealed. 3 

It is true that in the period 1821 to 1830 the foreign 
trade of the United Kingdom did not exhibit much material 
improvement, but still there was a steady increase. The 
official value of imports 4 rose from £30,000,000 to 
£46,000,000, and the value of British manufactures 5 ex- 
ported from £40,000,000 to £60,000,000. But the 
declared value of exports remained fairly steady at about 
£37,000,000. Yet in the United Kingdom itself trade 
was growing rapidly, 6 and the increase of wealth gave an 
opportunity for a general diminution of taxes, so that our 
sorely strained finances were set in order. 

Many of the injurious duties upon raw- materials and 
articles of British manufacture, as e.g., those on raw silk, 
coal, glass, 7 paper, and soap, were taken off, to the great 
advantage of our manufacturing industries. The crisis of 
1837, however, and the commercial depression 8 which 

1 The 3 and 4 Geo. IV., c. 37. In accordance with this Act, commercial 
treaties were made in 1824 with the Netherlands, Prussia, and Denmark ; 
in 1825 with the Hansa Towns ; in 1826 with France (for ten years) and 
Mexico ; and in 1829 with Austria. The trade with the United States had 
been put on a reciprocal footing in 1815. Cf. Craik, British Com- 
merce, iii. 237. 

2 See M'Culloch's Commercial Diet. (1844), s. v. silk and wool. 

s. v. oilk. 
4 lb. , s. v. Imports and Exports for exact figures. 5 lb. 

6 Yet many people believed it was decaying, till the evidence taken by a 
Committee of the Commons in 1833 disproved this idea. Cf. Tooke, 
History of Prices, ii. 242. 

7 For these see M'Culloch's Dictionary of Commerce, s. v. coal, glass, &c. ; 
and see his most interesting tabular statement of the different English 
customs tariffs of 1787, 1819, and 1844, s. v. Tariff. 

8 Tooke, History of Prices, iv. 269, regards this as comparatively slight ; 
but there were deficits in the budgets of 1838 (a million and a half), 1839 
(half a million), 1840 (a million and a half), 1841 (a million and three- 
quarters), and in 1842 (two millions) ; Northcote, Twenty Years of Finan- 
cial Policy, pp. 6, 12. 



453 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

followed it, together with continual deficits in the Budget, 
prevented further financial reforms for a few years, though 
eventually circumstances rendered them imperatively neces- 
sary, and Sir Robert Peel courageously faced the difficulties 
of national finance in 1842. 

§ 255. Revolution in the Means of Transit. 

Meanwhile, too, another great industrial revolution was 
being effected. The introduction of railways, steam naviga- 
tion, and the telegraph, has done almost as much as the 
great inventions of the eighteenth century to revolutionise 
the commerce of the world. The Stockton and Darlington 3 
railway was opened in 1825, and the Liverpool and Man- 
chester railway line in 1830. The first steamboat crossed 
the Atlantic, from Savannah to Liverpool, in 1825, in 
twenty-six days ; and in 1838 ocean passages to New York 
by steamship were also accomplished by the Great Western 
from Bristol, and the Sirius from Cork, 2 although ever 
since the beginning of the century small steamers and tugs 
had been used for coasting purposes, and on the river 
Clyde. In 1837 Cooke and Wheatstone patented the 
needle telegraph, 3 and the Electric Telegraph Company 
was formed in 1846 for bringing the new inventions into 
general use. In 1840 the penny postage came into 
operation. 4 Yet more recently the Suez Canal (1869) has 
shortened immensely the distance to the Easf. It is 
obvious to all how incalculably these inventions and 
appliances have aided the development, not only of Eng- 
lish trade, but of the commerce of the whole world. But, 
owing to this development, commerce has become no longer 
national so much as international, and commercial history 
loses therefore many of its national characteristics. 

1 M'Culloch, Commercial Diet. (1844), s. v. " Railroads," and Leone Levi, 
History, p. 192. 

2 lb., s. v. " Steam Vessels," and Leone Levi, History of British Com- 
merce, p. 196. 

3 lb. 

4 M'Culloch, Commercial Dictionary, s. v. " Postage," gives an account 
of its introduction. 



MODERN INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND 459 

§ 256. Modern Developments. 

It is not therefore necessary, in the limits of a work like 
this, to go into a detailed account of the growth of com- 
merce since these great modern inventions. There is 
ample material for the student in larger works ; and the 
statistics of our progress may be consulted in the invaluable 
pages of Mr Giffen's and Professor Leone Levi's books. 
Here we need only indicate in the broadest outlines the 
chief features of the recent developments of industry. We 
have followed the industrial history of England up to a 
period more prolific in commercial events, and more remark- 
able for commercial progress, than any that preceded it. 
The experiments and tentative measures of Mr Huskisson 
and other statesmen paved the way for a bolder and more 
assured policy on the part of subsequent governments, till 
at length Sir Robert Peel, compelled to some extent by the 
deficits x in the Budgets of former years to adopt some 
drastic policy of finance, attacked seriously the great 
question of the reform of the tariff in his now famous 
Budget of 1842. In this, 2 tariffs were reduced wholesale, 
but soon Peel went still further. Urged on by the Anti- 
Corn Law League, 3 and stimulated by a great, famine in 
Ireland in 1845, he openly adopted the principles of Free 
Trade. Under his leadership the Corn Laws were repealed 4 
(1846); the tariff was entirely remodelled, and the old pro- 
tective restrictions were abolished, Mr Gladstone's Budget 5 
of 1853 being particularly memorable in this direction. A 
great increase of trade followed the inauguration of the 
policy which is always associated with the famous name of 
Richard Cobden, and this increase was aided by various 
commercial treaties made between England and other 

1 Above, p. 457, note 8. 

2 By the Tariff Act, 5 and 6 Victoria, c. 47. M'Culloch remarks : " The 
passing of this Act forms an important era in the history of commercial 
and financial legislation " (Commercial Dictionary (1844), s. v. "Tariff") ; 
also cf. Prof. Bastable, Commerce of Nations, pp. 58-60. 

3 See Morley, Life of Cobden, ch. xi. 

4 By the 9 and 10 Victoria, c. 22. 

5 It reduced or abolished imports on 133 articles ; Montgredien, Free 
Trade (1881), p. 171 ; Bastable, Commerce of Nations, pp. 63, 64. 



460 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

countries. 1 Of these treaties, the most noticeable was that 
with France (1860), under which the prohibitive duties 
laid upon English goods were reduced by France to pro- 
tective duties of fairly moderate amount, while England 
abolished all duties on the import of manufactured 
goods, and greatly reduced those on wine and brandy. 2 
This treaty, which excited much controversy at the time, 
as raising the whole question of our commercial relations 
with foreign countries, was negotiated by Cobden. 3 In his 
efforts to form it Cobden was actuated by the hope that 
such treaties might lead to the gradual reduction of pro- 
tective duties and the introduction of Free Trade ; but in 
this, as in other cases, the enthusiasm of Free Traders has 
received a severe blow, and at the end of the nineteenth 
century there seems almost as small a chance of universal 
free trade as at the beginning of it. Some movement 
towards that enlightened policy has certainly been made, 
but progress has been very slow. Many wise statesmen 
deliberately continue to adopt a protective policy from an 
idea — which is far from being altogether baseless — that 
such a policy, though economically indefensible, is politi- 
cally advantageous. Time may prove that politics and 
economics are too closely allied to allow political ex- 
pediency to counterbalance economic error ; meanwhile it 
is somewhat doubtful whether protection, even from the 
political point of view, is worth the expense which it 
invariably entails. 

Be that as it may, the wealth of England has un- 
doubtedly increased enormously in the last fifty years. 4 
The revolution in transit, the use of electricity and steam, 
the freedom of our country from protracted warfare, the 
growth of population, and the spread of our colonial de- 
pendencies, have all contributed to this result. The 

1 See list in Appendix to Leone Levi's British Commerce. 

2 See Morley's Life of Cobden, eh. xxvii. This treaty lasted till 1872, 
when it was denounced by Thiers, but was renewed in 1873, and so far 
modified in 1882 as to be practically useless. 

8 Morley's Life of Cobden, ch. xxvii. ; also cf. Bastable, Commerce of 
Nations, pp. 65, 66. 

4 See Table xxvi. at end of Farrer's Free Trade v. Fair Trade. 



MODERN INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND 461 



growth of commerce may be seen by comparing the figures 
of our exports and imports from 1855 to 1890, from 
which it will be seen that the most rapid increase went on 
until 1870 or 1872, and that since then it has not been 
so remarkable. On the other hand, it must be remem- 
bered that these figures are values only, and do not show 
the actual volume of trade. It is beyond doubt that, in 
spite of the groans of pessimists, the foreign commerce of 
England is greater now than it was in 1872, though, 
owing to a great depreciation in prices, the values may 
seem lower; and that the actual commercial intercourse 
of this country with others has largely increased. 1 

TRADE OF THE UNITED KINGDOM. 2 



Yeak. 


Imports. 


EXPOETS. 


Produce of U.K. 


Foreign Produce. 


Total Exports. 


1855 
1860 

1870 
1880 
1885 
1887 
1890 


143,542,850 
210,530,873 
303,257,493 
411,229,565 
370,967,955 
362,227,564 
420,885,695 


95,688,085 
135,891,227 
199,586,822 
223,060,446 
213,044,500 
221,414,186 
263,531,585 


21,003,215 
28,630,124 
44,493,755 
63,354,020 
58,359,194 
59,348,975 
64,349,091 


116,691,300 
164,521,351 
244,134,738 
286,414,466 
271,403,694 
280,763.161 
327,880,676 



Even before 1855, however, England was commercially 
far ahead of other countries. The great Exhibition of 
1851, for instance, the precursor of several others, showed 
to all the world her immense superiority in productive and 
manufacturing industries. A certain stimulus to trade was 
given at the same time by the discovery of gold in California 
and Australia (1847-51), which supplied a much-needed 
addition to the currency of the world. 

§ 257. Our Colonies. 

But one of the most important causes of the growth of 
British trade has been the quite modern development of our 

1 See the article Commerce in Palgrave's Diet, of Pol. Econ., i. 339. It 
is there stated that the volume of our foreign commerce is 30 per cent, 
larger than in 1872. 

2 The table is from the article Commerce in Palgrave's Dictionary of Pol. 
Econ. (Vol. I.). Since 1854 "official" values were abandoned in favour of 
" computed" values for imports and " declared " values for exports. 



462 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

colonies. 1 Since the war of American Independence, Eng- 
land has been building up a great colonial empire, and she 
has been wise enough not to attempt again to levy taxes upon 
her unwilling offspring. India was taken over from the 
East India Company (1858). The colonies of Canada and 
the Cape were gained by conquest ; those of Australia and 
New Zealand were the result of spontaneous settlement. 2 
The two former were captured from the French and Dutch, 
but of South Africa at least we have not yet made a 
commercial or even a political success ; nor are we likely to 
do so unless we have the sense to keep on good terms with 
the original settlers, and to allow no misplaced sentiment 
about native races to disturb cordial relations between 
Europeans. The recent activity in gold mining in South 
Africa will, however, have a beneficial influence upon that 
branch of our colonial trade. As regards our Australasian 
colonies, they have grown far beyond the expectations of 
former generations, and gained for themselves entire political 
freedom, though they have chosen to use it chiefly in carry- 
ing on a one-sided war of hostile protective tariffs against 
their mother-country. 3 As, however, they owe English 
capitalists a large amount of money, the interest on which 
is paid in colonial goods, there is a strong commercial bond 
of union between the old country and the new ; a bond 
which protectionists in England are strangely anxious to 
break, by placing unnatural obstacles upon the payment in 
goods of the interest due upon colonial loans. It is calcu- 
lated that the amount of capital 4 borrowed from English 
investors by the colonies is some 250 millions at present 
outstanding, and, unless some violent act of repudiation 
takes place, the interest alone on this vast sum guarantees 

1 For the great question of colonial trade, see Farrer, Free Trade v. 
Fair Trade, on the one hand, and the publications of the Imperial Federa- 
tion League on the other. A useful summary is found in Palgrave's Diet. 
Pol. Econ. (Art. Trade and the Flag, by A. Caldecott, i. 324-326) ; also 
my British Commerce and Colonies, ch. xvii. 

2 See Caldecott's Colonisation and Empire for a short summary of colonial 
history, and Lucas's Historical Geography of the British Colonies. 

3 Cf. Prof. Bastable, The Commerce of Nations, ch. x. 

4 Palgrave's Diet. Pol. Econ. , i. 324 ; and see paper on Colonial Indebted- 
ness, by H. F. Billington, in Journal of Institute of Bankers, March 1889. 



MODERN INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND 463 

a considerable trade between borrowers and lender. 1 But 
into this most interesting question of colonial commerce, 2 
involving as it does colonial history and colonial industry, 
there is not space to enter in the limits of the industrial 
history of the mother-country. It can be studied at length 
in other works, and here is only noted as one element in 
the enormous foreign trade which our home industries have 
rendered possible. 

§ 258. England and other Nations' Wars. 

But besides the extension of our colonial relations, Eng- 
lish trade has benefited by the quarrels of her competitors. 3 
The prostration of Continental nations after 1815 precluded 
much competition till almost the middle of the century, and 
then the Crimean War broke out (1854-56). As mentioned 
before, this war gave a great stimulus to our agriculture. 4 
and had a similar effect upon our manufactures. The 
Indian Mutiny which followed it did not much affect our 
trade, but it rendered necessary the deposition of the East 
India Company and the assumption of government by the 
Crown (1858), and thus eventually served to put our rela- 
tions to that vast and rich empire upon a much more satis- 
factory and profitable basis. About the same time the 
Chinese wars of 1842 and 1857, regrettable as they were, 
established our commercial relations with the East generally 
upon a firm footing, and since then our trade with Eastern 
nations has largely developed. Then came the Civil War 
in America (1861-65), after which there was an urgent 
demand for English products to replace the waste caused 
by this severe conflict. The Civil War was succeeded by a 
series of short European wars, chiefly undertaken for the 
sake of gaining a frontier, as was the war waged by Prussia 
and Austria upon Denmark (1864), followed by another 
struggle between the two former allies (1866). Then in 
1870-71 all Europe was shaken by the tremendous fight 

1 Cf. Rogers, Economic Interpretation of History, 339-340. 

2 Very full statistics of its relation to British and foreign trade are given in 
Farcer's Free Trade v. Fair Trade, especially in Table V. of the Appendix. 

3 For the following brief summary, cf. Rogers, Economic Interpretation, 
pp. 292-294. 4 7&.,p. 293. 



464 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

between France and Germany, and since then the Conti- 
nental nations have occupied themselves in keeping up an 
armed peace at an expense which, though undoubtedly in 
the present state of affairs necessary, is almost equal to that 
of actual warfare. All their conflicts have arrested their 
industrial development, to their own detriment, but to Eng- 
land's great advantage. Not content, however, with that, 
they increase their difficulties by a dogged protectionism. 1 
As a result, they are far poorer in general wealth than our 
own land, 2 and only succeed in competing with us by means 
of underpaid and overworked labour. But the labourer will 
not always consent to be overworked and underpaid, and 
signs are not wanting that his discontent is fast ripening 
into something more dangerous. 

§ 259. Present Difficulties. Commercial Crises. 

But although English commerce has reached a height of 
prosperity considerably above that of other nations, it has 
not been, and is not now, without serious occasional diffi- 
culties. It has been throughout the century visited at more 
or less periodic intervals by severe commercial crises. In- 
deed, very soon after the conclusion of the Continental War, 
a severe commercial crisis passed over this country. 3 It 
happened partly because during the war our manufacturers 
had accumulated vast stocks of manufactured products, and 
could not get rid of them as quickly as tney expected, 
owing to the financial exhaustion of those countries whom 
they expected to be their customers/ and partly also 
because foreign countries sought to protect their own 
almost ruined industries by imposing prohibitive duties 
upon English manufactures. The harvests of 1816 and 
1817 were also very bad in England, and these, added to 
the causes just mentioned, produced a very severe crisis, 5 

1 Bastable, The Commerce of Nations, ch. ix. (on European Tariffs, 1865- 
1890). 

2 Cf MulhalPs Dictionary of Statistics. 

3 During the war there had also occurred a very severe crisis, that of 
1810-11 ; cf. Tooke, History of Prices, i. 303 sqq., and iv. 273. 

4 7&., ii. 8 to 12. 

5 lb., ii. 77-79; Craik, British Commerce, iii. 219-224. 



MODERN INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND 465 

which reached its worst point in 1819. Once again, in 
1825, a second crisis followed, caused by the too rapid 
importation of raw products that had been bought at a 
very high price, and by financial follies in speculation in 
the trade with the Spanish-American colonies, that seemed 
to recall the days of the South Sea bubble. 1 In fact, this 
panic is often called the second South Sea bubble. Ten 
years afterwards, in 1836 to 1839, another crisis occurred, 
owing chiefly to the formation of numerous joint- stock 
banks 2 and other companies, together with extravagant 
speculation in corn and tea. During the forties, however, 
our commercial condition continued to improve, and capital 
was rapidly accumulated, till the bad harvest of 1846, com- 
bined with speculations in grain, and the high price of 
cotton, caused another period of disaster, 3 in which the 
cotton industry, in particular, was severely damaged. The 
speculations in railways were also remarkable at this time, 
no less than £500,000,000 being raised in loans 4 in 1847. 
The country, however, recovered once more, and with the 
discoveries of gold in California and Australia in 1851, a 
renewed activity was seen in all branches of trade. As the 
supplies of gold increased, English exports increased also, 
since they were eagerly taken, especially by Australia, in 
return for the precious metals. Nevertheless, before very 
long another crisis 5 broke upon the commercial community 
(1857), having its origin in North America, but which 
extended over the whole commercial world, and proved very 
prejudicial to English interests on account of the close con- 
nection between our country and the United States. This 
time our iron and textile industries were specially affected ; 
factories were closed, and blast furnaces extinguished, and 
the greatest distress prevailed amongst the working classes. 
But once more the nation recovered as usual ; and for 

1 These colonies required capital to work their silver mines, and this 
led to heavy speculation by English capitalists; cf. Tooke, u. s., ii. 145, 
147, 159. 

2 Tooke, u. s., ii. 278, 303. 

3 Ib.,iv. 314 (railways); Leone Levi, British Commerce, p. 310; Pal- 
grave's Diet. Pol. Econ. , i. 459. 

4 Diet. Pol. Econ., i. 459. 

5 Diet. Pol. Econ. , i. 464 ; Hyndman, Commercial Crises, ch. v. 

2 G 



466 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

another few years continued to prosper till the cotton in- 
dustry was for a second time almost ruined by the effects of 
the Slavery War between the Northern and Southern States 
of America. A " cotton famine " occurred in Lancashire, 
when 800,000 wage-earners were deprived of their live- 
lihood. This caused an increase of cotton-growing in India* 
which has continued since that time. 1 

§ 260. Commercial Crises since 1865, 

But once again this industry recovered from what seemed 
to be a very severe blow, and the close of the American 
War in 1865 even gave a further impetus to new business, 
while, at the same time, considerable developments took 
place in our trade with China, India, and Australia. But 
the very next year the sudden and unexpected failure of 
the great bill-broking firm of Overend, Gurney & Co. 
caused much panic, 2 not only in financial but in industrial 
circles, though the ordinary symptoms of crisis were fortun- 
ately not apparent in the trade returns, and for some years 
our prosperity continued to increase, till a crisis 3 of truly 
international magnitude occurred in 1873. It was felt 
from New York to Moscow, and affected the trade industry 
and agriculture of all intervening countries. It was due to 
some extent to the great financial inflation which took 
place within the German Empire after the payment of 
£200,000,000 indemnity by the French to their con- 
querors, while a similar inflation prevailed in the United 
States, owing to the rapid growth of business and the ex- 
tension of railways after the Civil War. England escaped 
much of the severity of this international crisis (1873), 4 but 
soon afterwards suffered from agricultural depression, and 
has continued to do so since, from the causes mentioned in 
a previous chapter. During the last twenty years, the two- 
most severe periods of crisis have taken place in 1882 and 

1 Hyndman, Commercial Crises, p. 93. 

2 lb., p. 95. 3 lb., ch. vii. 

4 Though two great failures — that of Collie & Co., in 1875, and the 
Glasgow Bank, in 1878 — showed that there was some uneasiness. 

5 Hyndman, Commercial 0. arid ix. 



MODERN INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND 467 

1890, the former connected with the failure of the Union 
Generale of France, combined with the low prices and 
general stagnation of trade in Great Britain, which lasted 
till 1888 ; and the latter due to the extravagant specula- 
tion, especially in South American securities, which termin- 
ated in the difficulties experienced by the well-known firm 
of Baring Brothers, and the panic which followed the 
discovery of their unsafe situation. More recently still, 
the increasingly protective M'Kinley tariff adopted by the 
United States has had a depressing effect upon many British 
industries. 

§ 261. The Recent Depression in Trade. 

Still more recently (1895) there has been an outburst of 
speculative activity in the shares of South African gold- 
mines, and some derangement has occurred, but we are 
assured by an eminent authority * that there has been no 
absolute panic since 1866. There has been, however, a 
very long period of depression, beginning about 1875 and 
gradually growing worse till 1885, when a Commission was 
appointed to take evidence on the subject. The peculiarity 
of this depression has been its gradual growth and con- 
tinuance, in contrast to the former crises, which occurred 
after periods of sudden inflation, and passed away with 
comparative rapidity. The evidence of the Commission of 
1885 showed that during this depression wages had, on the 
whole, remained firm, and that the incomes of those in 
trades and professions had actually increased, while, on the 
other hand, profits had been lowered, and the rate of 
interest reduced. It was agreed by most of the witnesses 
before the Commission that there had been much over- 
production, and though this is true to some extent, it would 
seem, on the whole, that at least one of the main causes 
of this prolonged depression was a slow but radical change 
in the relations of labour and capital, causing a closer 
approximation between the shares of the total product 

1 Mr W. Fowler in his article on the Crises of 1857, 1866, and 1890, in 
Palgrave's Diet. Pol. Econ., i. 462. The articles on Crises in this Dic- 
tionary should be compared with Hyndman's views in his book above 
quoted. 



468 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

allotted to each. It is also probable that the term de- 
pression is only comparative in this case, and only shows a 
falling-off as compared with the abnormal activity of 
1871-74, and also it should be borne in mind that, though 
English manufacturers have hitherto had a considerable 
start over their foreign neighbours, this advantage cannot 
be expected always to continue, as other countries will 
naturally tread more closely on the heels of our own in the 
race of international competition. In any case, however, 
there is no immediate fear for the future of Eoglish 
industry, although individual merchants or manufacturers 
may suffer, for it has already been seen above (p. 461) 
that the volume of our trade is by no means yet diminish- 
ing. But there are certain considerations on this subject 
of crises and depressions which are of a more general 
character. 

The causes of such depressions in trade are various, and 
not always obvious. They are, so to speak, dislocations of 
industry, resulting largely from mistaken calculations on the 
part of those " captains of industry " whose raison d'Stre is 
their ability to interpret the changing requirements in the 
great modern market of the civilised world. A failure in 
their calculations, a slight mistake as to how long the 
demand for a particular class of goods will last, or as to the 
number of those who require them, results very soon in 
a glut of the market, in a case of what is called " over- 
production," but is in reality merely production of the 
wrong things ; and this is as inevitably followed by a 
period of depression, occasionally enlivened by desperate 
struggles on the part of some manufacturer to sell his 
goods at any cost. With such a vast field as the inter- 
national market, it is not to be wondered at that such 
mistakes are by no means rare, nor does it seem as if it 
were possible to avoid them under the present unorganised 
and purely competitive industrial system. They have been 
aggravated in England by a belief that our best customers 
are to be found in foreign markets, while the importance of 
a steady, well established, and well understood home market 
is not fully perceived. " A pound of home trade," it has 



MODERN INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND 469 

been said, 1 "is more significant to manufacturing industry 
than thirty shillings or two pounds of foreign." The com- 
parison may not be exact, but it is on the right lines. 
Now one of the most important branches of our home trade 
must be the supplying of agriculturists with manufactures 
in exchange for food. But when the purchasing power 
of this class of the community has sunk as much as 
£43,000,000 per annum, 2 it is obvious that such a loss of 
custom must seriously affect manufacturers. Again, no 
small portion of our home market must consist in the pur- 
chases made by the working classes, yet it does not seem 
to occur to capitalist manufacturers that if they pay a large 
proportion of the industrial classes the lowest possible 
wages, and get them to work the longest possible hours, 
while thus obtaining an ever-increasing production of 
goods, the question must sooner or later be answered : who 
is going to consume the goods thus produced ? 

§262. The Present Mercantile System. Foreign Markets. 

The answer as far as the capitalist is concerned seems to 
be — foreign customers in new markets. English manufac- 
turers and capitalists have consistently supported that 
policy which seemed likely to open up these new markets 
to their goods. For a considerable time, as we saw, they 
occupied themselves very wisely in obtaining cheap raw 
material by passing enactments actuated by Free Trade 
principles, and removing protective restrictions. Cheap raw 
material having thus been gained, and machinery having 
now been developed to such an extent as to increase pro- 
duction quite incalculably, England sends her textile and 
other products all over the world. She seems to find it 
necessary to discover fresh markets every generation or so, 
in order that this vast output of commodities may be sold. 
The merchant and manufacturing classes have supported 
and still support this policy, from a desire, apparently, 
rather to find new customers than to keep the old; and, 
largely for the sake of British trade, wars have been made 

1 Thorold Rogers, Relations of Economic Science to Social and Political 
Action, p. 10. 

2 Sir J. Lawes, quoted above, p. 451, note 1. 



470 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

on China, Egypt, and Burmah, while at the present moment 
England is scrambling with Germany, Portugal, and other 
powers for the new markets of Africa. To-day, indeed, the 
industrial history of our country seems to have reached a 
point when production under a purely mercantile system is 
overreaching itself. It must go on and on without ceasing, 
finding or fighting for an outlet for the wealth produced, 
lest the whole gigantic system of international commerce 
should break down by the mere weight of its own im- 
mensity. Meanwhile, English manufacturers are complain- 
ing, of foreign competition in plaintive tones, a complaint 
which merely means that, whereas they thought some years 
ago that they had a complete monopoly in supplying the 
requirements of the world, they are now perceiving that 
they have not a monopoly at all, but only a good start, 
while other nations are already catching them up in the 
modern race for wealth. 

§ 263. Over-production and Wages. 

With all this, too, we hear cries of over-production, a 
phrase which economically is meaningless (except in so far 
as it indicates that production is proceeding in the wrong 
direction), more especially at a time when very large 
numbers of people in civilised communities are daily on the 
verge of starvation, when the paupers of every civilised 
country are numbered by thousands, and plenty of people 
who never complain have neither enough clothes to wear 
nor enough food to eat. Wages are certainly better than 
they were fifty years ago, but no one who knows the facts 
of the case will deny that for the average workman — I am 
not speaking of skilled artisans and the dite of the working 
classes — it is practically impossible to save anything out of 
his wages that would form an adequate provision against 
old age or sickness. It is not the business of a historian 
to vituperate any particular class, but he may justly point 
out the mistakes to which classes have as a matter of his- 
tory been liable. And the great mistake of the capitalist 
class in modern times has been to pay too little wages. It 
is an old agricultural saying — quoted, I believe, as Arthur 



MODERN INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND 471 

Young's — that one cannot pay too much for good land, or 
too little for bad land. The same remark applies to labour. 
Capitalist employers rarely make the mistake of paying too 
much for bad labour, but they have constantly, as a matter 
of history, committed the worse error of paying too little 
for good labour. There are, however, signs at present that 
this state of things is being altered. But at the beginning 
of this century, as has been shown, the coming of the 
capitalists and of the capitalist factory system, beneficial as 
it was ultimately to England, was followed by a time of 
unprecedented misery and poverty for those whom they 
empk^ed. The day of the capitalist has come, and he has 
made full use of it. To-morrow will be the day of the 
labourer, provided that he has the strength and the wisdom 
to use his opportunities. 

§ 264. The Power of Labour. Trades Unions 
and Go-operation. 

For the labourers of to-day are a very different class from 
their ancestors of fifty or seventy years ago. They have 
learnt, at least the most advanced among them, the power 
of combination, a remedy which at one time was forbidden 
them, but which is now fortunately once more theirs. The 
steady growth of Trades Unions and of Co-operative 
Societies has taught them habits of self-reliance and of 
thrift, and has made them look more closely into the eco- 
nomic conditions of industry. These unions and societies 
do not yet embrace more than a small fraction of English 
workmen, but they contain the best and worthiest of them, 
and their members are able to preserve a certain indepen- 
dence of attitude in treating with their employers. Even 
as it is, the gigantic power of modern capital finds itself 
occasionally confronted by the united forces of modern 
labour. But these occasions are rare, and more often an 
isolated body of workmen engages in a futile conflict with 
superior strength. The great Dock Strike of 1889 showed, 
indeed, what power the union of labour might possess, but 
the success of that famous conflict was, after all, due 
to other causes than the solidarity of labour, and many 



472 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

subsequent events have shown the weakness of the workmen 
who enter upon these deplorable struggles. It may be 
deplored that the relations of employer to employed are 
such as to necessitate these combinations, but it cannot 
always be said that it is the fault of the labourer if the 
relations of labour and capital are somewhat strained. 
Whether he looks back to the days of assessment of wages 
and the Law of Settlement ; to the Statutes of Labourers 
of the Middle Ages, or the Combination Laws of more 
modern times ; whether he remembers the degradation and 
horrors of the first factories and mines, or the grinding 
misery of agricultural life after his common rights had been 
taken from him, and he and his children worked in gangs not 
so well cared for as foreign slaves — when he hears of all these 
things he naturally does not credit the employer of his labour 
with the best intentions towards him. Nothing is so wasteful 
and nothing so dangerous as industrial strife ; but before the 
labourer can fairly be called upon to desist from it he must 
have some guarantee of his own industrial freedom and safety. 
This he is rapidly gaining, and when masters and men re- 
cognise alike the identity of interest and the equal rights of 
Capital and Labour, the industrial history of England will 
have entered upon a new era of unassailable prosperity. 

At present the position of the working-classes has been 
vastly improved in their political relations, and there are 
many signs that they are using political means — as other 
classes have done — to gain economic ends. The spirit of 
democracy is gaining strength, and the wave of democratic 
progress is washing down the ancient barriers of privilege 
and rank. Its advance has been welcomed by thinkers and 
statesmen of no mean order, and the advent of political 
power is hailed as bringing with it material prosperity. Yet 
there must remain, even in the minds of many who sympa- 
thise with the industrial classes, grave doubts as to the 
ultimate benefits of a popular government ; and the gravest 
doubt of all arises when it becomes increasingly evident that 
the advance of democracy practically involves the acquisition 
of irresponsible power by the working-classes, who form 
already the majority of parliamentary voters. No man, and 



MODERN INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND 473 

110 mass of men, has yet been found fit to be trusted for 
long with such a power, for it is a weapon which wounds 
equally those who use it and those against whom it is 
directed. And unless the working-classes of England can 
learn a lesson from the errors of their former rulers in the 
past, there can be but little hope that they will reach the 
highest level of national prosperity in the future. 

§ 265. The Necessity of Studying Economic Factors in 
History. 

For, hitherto, our prosperity, great as it is, has frequently 
had its drawbacks, and has passed through many vicissi- 
tudes. Our ancestors and ourselves have made many 
mistakes, and till recently, as we have seen, the growth 
of our national wealth has been slow. But a study of 
industrial history is not without its uses, if it helps us 
to-day to understand how we have come into our present 
position, and what faults and follies we must avoid in 
order to retain it. Unfortunately, few historians have 
thought it worth their while to study seriously the economic 
factors in the history of nations. They have contented 
themselves with the intrigues and amusements of courtiers 
and kings, the actions of individual statesmen, or the 
destructive feats of military heroes. They have often 
failed to explain properly the great causes which neces- 
sitated the results they claim to investigate. But just as 
it is impossible to understand the growth of England with- 
out a proper appreciation of the social and industrial events 
which rendered that growth possible, and provided the 
expenses which that growth entailed, so it will be impos- 
sible to proceed in the future without a systematic study of 
economic and industrial affairs. For the great political 
questions of the day are becoming more and more economic 
questions. We have only to look round Europe to-day and 
we may judge from the occurrences of the present how far 
economic questions are in the forefront of politics. Con- 
tinental nations are struggling under the double burden of 
military necessities and protective tariffs, and are trying to 
find a market for their protected manufactures by an 



474 INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 

aggressive colonisation that is increasingly likely to involve 
them in international difficulties. France has sought fresh 
colonies in Madagascar, Africa, and the Far East ; and her 
interests are continually clashing with those of England. 
Germany and our own country are face to face in Africa. 
Both France and Germany are seriously threatened from 
time to time with internal dissensions proceeding entirely 
from labour troubles, and the same causes are operating 
in Spain and Austria. The agricultural crisis that has 
long prevailed in Eussia only aggravates the general finan- 
cial difficulties of that much-disturbed and much-disturbing 
empire. Every foreign power, whether in the Old World 
or the New, which either has colonies now or intends to 
have them soon, regards England's colonial empire with an 
unceasing jealousy, and does not even attempt to conceal 
its delight when aoy difficulty arises that may compromise 
England's position. This jealousy is the natural feeling of 
the poor towards the rich, and of the debtor towards the 
creditor. It finds its economic interpretation in the fact 
that England has planted her flag, sold her goods, and lent 
her money in every quarter of the globe. Yet at home, 
with all our riches, we have plenty of trouble. The agrarian 
difficulties in Ireland have proceeded largely from economic 
as well as from national and political causes, and may lead 
us into an expenditure which will severely tax our indus- 
trial resources. The Eight Hours' Movement has already 
developed into a political question, and industrial legislature 
is more and more becoming the order of the day. Our 
relations with our colonies, and especially with India, 
require most careful treatment upon an economic basis. 
Commercial and industrial considerations must weigh more 
and more heavily with us if we are thoroughly to secure our 
position as a united and stable empire. They are not by 
any means the only considerations, yet those of us who wish 
to help in maintaining and in forwarding the progress of 
modern England must seek to answer clearly the economic 
questions that are pressing themselves upon us, by looking 
at them in the light afforded by the industrial history of a 
great industrial nation. 



INDEX 



Aboriginal races of Britain, 5 

Accounts, agricultural, 113 

Agrarian difficulties (sixteenth cen- 
tury), 211, 217 

Agriculture, Celtic, 13 

in Roman period, 25 ; early in- 
fluences in, 27 ; Saxon, 39 ; later, 
99 ; mediaeval, 112 ; (methods of), 
113, 116, 185 ; (sixteenth century), 
211, 247 ; (seventeenth century), 
265 ; writers on, 268 ; (eighteenth 
century), 270 ; (agricultural popu- 
lation), 331, 335; (modern agric.), 
427, ch. xxv. ; (revolution in), 430 ; 
(protection in), 435 ; (improve- 
ments), 436 ; (depression in), 439- 
445 ; (prices of produce), 440 ; 
(agric. capital), 443 ; (value of 
land), 451 ; (revival of), 452 

Allowance system of relief, 408, 413 

Alfred, 46 

America, discovery of, 218 ; colonies 
in, 285, 289, 295, 366 ; war, 367- 
370 ; (civil war), 463 

Antwerp, 228, 230 

Apprentice system, 95 ; (Elizabethan 
law), 259 ; (in factories), 388 

Arch, Joseph, 449 

Arkwright, 343 

Assessment of wages, 253-259, 281 

Assiento contract, 289 

Assize, 139 



B 



Bailiff, 114, 174 

Bakewell, 429 

Banking, 299; (Bank of England), 

300, 322, 374 
Barter, 43 
Bordars, 72 
Bounties on corn, 433 
Brickmaking, 316 
Bright, John, on factory acts, 405 
Bronze age, 8 
Bye-industries, 325, 329; (loss of), 385 



C 



Cabot, 193, 218 

Canada, 295 

Canals, 355 

Cape Colony, 462 

Capitalists, rise of, 324 

Capitalist manufacturers, 325, 326, 
381 

Cattle, ancient, 7 ; improvements in, 
271 

Cartwright, 344 

Celts in England, 5, 8 ; (Pytheas on), 
11-14 

Chancellor, Richard, 231 

Changes in fifteenth century, 192 

in sixteenth century, 220 

Charters of towns, 91 

Charter, the Great, 101 

Chartists, 377 

Children in factories, 388-402 

Closes, 115 

Clothiers, 147 

Coal and coal mining, 310-312, 353, 
423 

Cobbett, 376 

Cobden, 460 

Cockayne's monopoly, 306 

Coke of Holkham, 429 

Colonies, 290, 293, 295 ; (policy to- 
wards), 364 ; (American), 366 ; (war 
with), 368 ; (trade with), 461 

Columbus, 193, 218 

Combination Acts, 416 

Commendation, 53, 61 

Commerce in sixteenth and following 
centuries, 284-304, and see Trade 

Common fields, 115, 273 

Communal ownership, see Manor 

Communal land, 115 

Communication, improvements in, 
354 ; (recent), 458 

Co-operative societies, 471 

Copyholders, 38 

Corn laws, 432, 435 

Cottars, 72 

Cotton manufactures, 346 

Counties, population and wealth of, 
67-69 



476 



INDEX 



Crises, commercial, 464-468 

Crompton, 343 

Cromwell, Oliver, 286 

Crusades, 100 

Cultivation, methods of (Saxon), 40 

Currency (under Henry VIII.), 206 ; 

(Elizabeth), 235; (William III.), 

300 
Customary tenants, 56 
Customs tariff, 375 
Cuxham Manor, 79 



Dairy, 115 

Danes, 43-45, 61 

Darby, Abraham, 314 

Darien scheme, 301 

Debasement of currency, 206 

Defoe on commercial men, 322 

Dock strike, 471 

Domesday Book, 65-85 

Domestic system of industry, 336 

Drainage of fens, 268 

Drainage, agricultural, 436, 437 

Drake, 231, 232 

Drawbacks of mediaeval life, 177 

Dudley and iron trade, 313 

Dutch (in agriculture), 249 ; (in 

trade), 287 ; wars with, 287 
Dunstan, St, 41 
Dyeing, 131, 305 



Early Britain, people of, 10 ; condi- 
tion of, 11 
East India Co., 285, 293, 463 
Economic factors in history, 473 
Edward III. and manufactures, 127 ; 

and staple, 136 
Edward VI. , 209 ; his ministers, 209, 

234 
Elizabethan seamen, 221, 231 
Elizabethan England, 234-263 
Enclosures, 119, 213, 215 ; results 
of (sixteenth century), 216-218 ; 
(seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
turies), 274 ; (benefits of), 275 ; 
(number of), 335 
Enumerated articles, the, 366 
Exports, early, 15, 32 ; (Norman 
period), 100 ; (sixteenth century), 
240 ; (later), 297, 455, 457 



Factory Acts, 391-406; (summary of), 

403 
Factory, germs of, 146 
, early, 347 ; increase of, 348 ; 

life in, 388 
Factory system, results of, 381, 388 ; 

factory agitation, 391-405 
Fairs, 42, 140 
Famine, 151, 178 
Farmers, see Agriculture 
Fens drained, 268 
Feudal system, 60, 98 
Fifteenth century changes, 193 
Finances (Ed. VI.), 210, 219, 220 
Firma unius noctis, 54 
Firma burgi, 90, 188 
Fitzherbert, 171 
Flanders, trade with, 229 
Flemish weavers, 105, 121, 127, 129 
Flemish immigrants, 241 
Foreign trade (Saxon), 43 ; mediseval, 

223-233 ; (sixteenth century), 240 ; 

(seventeenth century), 297 ; (later), 

455, 457 
Forests, 17, 313 
France, 291, 293 
Frauds, statute of, 277 
Free and unfree, 38, 73, 76 
Free Trade, 456 
Frobisher, 231 
Fuggers, the, 210 



G 



Gang-labour in agriculture, 449 

Geburs, 38 

Geneat, 37 

Gentry, country, 182 

Gilds, 91 ; merchant, 93 ; craft, 94 ; 

functions of, 95 ; rural, 96 ; in 

cloth trade, 130 ; and towns, 189 ; 

lands, confiscation of, 207 ; revival 

of craft gilds, 246 
Greshams, the, 229 
Grossteste, 113 



II 

Halifax, 237 

Hansa, the, 124, 227 

Hargreaves, James, 343 

Hawkins, 231 

Henley, Walter de, 113 

Henry VII., 193, 194, 196 



INDEX 



477 



Henry VIII., expenses of, 199 ; popu- 
larity of, 201 ; and monasteries, 
202 ; and coinage, 206 

Huguenots, in England, 308 

Husbandry (book), 113, and see 
Agriculture 

Huskisson, 456 



Imports, 16, 32, 45, 101, 143, 224-227, 
229, 297, 366, 455, 457 

Income of different classes (eighteenth 
century), 334 

Independence, American, 369 

India, 285, 293 

Industrial History, 3, 473 

Industry. Celtic, 12-14 

in Roman period, 31 

Intercursus Magnus, 123 

Inventors and inventions of eigh- 
teenth century, 343 

Iron age, 9 

Iron, 15 ; (iron trade), 313, 353 

Isolation of villages, 41 



Jack of Newbury, 147 

Jews, 103 



Labourers, statute of, 153, 165 
Labourer, condition of (fourteenth 
and fifteenth centuries), 172-179 ; 
(Elizabethan period), 251 ; (eigh- 
teenth and early nineteenth cen- 
turies), 407, 421 ; (agricultural), 447 
Land, sentiment about, 322 

, kinds of in a village, 82 

— -, labourers and the, 445 
Landowners and the Plague, 156, 164 
Landowners, services of, 427 
Large and small holdings, 157 
Lords of the manors, 70 



M 



Machinery and hand labour, 383-385 

Manchester, 237 ; Manchester Mas- 
sacre, the, 377 

Manor and manorial system, 47-61, 
70, 78 ; decay of, 85, 211 

Manorial courts, 55, 80 

Manual industry, 316 

Manufacturers, small. 326 



Manufactures, 104, 121, 125; (for- 
eign), 126 ; (and politics), 132 ; (in 
Elizabethan period), 237 ; (later), 
305, 309 ; (domestic system), 336 

Manufacturing population, 327 

Manures, 437 

Markets, 42, 107, 138 ; (foreign), 469 

Mark theory, the, 48 ; (criticism), 49 

Marshes, 18 

Mary, Queen, 234 

Mayor, 188 

Mercantile theory, the, 359-364 

Mercantile system, the present, 469 

Merchants and politics, 138 

Merton, statute of, 214 

Methuen treaty, 302 

Middle Ages, close of, 180, 194 

Migration of population from South 
to North, 350 

Mining (early), 9 ; (Roman), 31 ; 
(mediaeval), 315 ; (later), 316 ; 
(eighteenth century), 352 

Monasteries, dissolution of, 202-205 

Monopolies (of towns). 239 ; (other), 
242-246 ; (Cockayne's), 306 

Municipal institutions, 189 



N 



Navigation Acts, 287, 456 

Neolithic age, 6 

Nobles, 181 

Norman period, summary of, 108 

Norwich, 125, 129 



Oastler, 393 

Origin of the manor, 5S 

Over-production, 470 



Papal exactions, 123 
Paris, Treaty of, 293 
Pauperism, 195, 205, 219, 260, 410, 

422 
Peel, Robert, 459 

Physical features of early Britain, 17 
Pilgrimage of Grace, 203 
Plague, the Great, 151-160 
Plagues, 178 
Piers the Plowman, 162 
Pigs, 39, 116 
Piracy, 145 



478 



INDEX 



Pole, Wm. de la, 137 

Politics and industry, 321, 358, 376, 
418 

Poor Laws, 205, 260, 411, 412 

Population (in Domesday), 66, 106, 
112 ; (Elizabethan), 263 ; eigh- 
teenth century), 332, 349-352 ; 
(decline of rural), 445, 446 

Ports, 89, 107, 144 

Pottery trade, 314, 338 

Poultry, 116 

Prehistoric influences, 4 

Productivity of soil, 272 

Progress, 149 

Prices of provisions (mediaeval), 175 

Protection in agriculture, 434, 435 

Pytheas, 11-14 



Quia Emptores' Statute, 158 



R 



Railways, 458 

Raleigh, 231 

Reform, parliamentary, 379 

Regulation of prices, 139 

Rent (in kind), 75 ; rise of, 213 ; (in 
seventeenth century), 267 ; later, 
279 ; (eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries), 428 

Revolt, the Peasants', 161-172 

Revolution, the Industrial (eighteenth 
century), 323, 341 ; (and French), 
342, 371, 379 ; (political results of 
industrial), 378, 418 ; (in agricul- 
ture), 430 

Richard II., 166, 170 

Roads and Rivers, 16 

Roads, Roman, 22 

, mediaeval, 354 

(eighteenth century), 355 

Romans in Britain, 21-31 

Roses, Wars of the, 132, 195 



S 



Sadler, M. T., 397 

Salt, 42 

Saxon period, 84, 46 

Scotland, Union with, 302 

Seebohm, F. , referred to, 51 

Services of tenants, 74 

Settlement, Law of, 415, 416 



Shaftesbury, Lord, 399, 403 

Sheep, 117 

Sheep farming, 118, 185, 216, 248 

Silures, 6 

Six Acts, the, 377 

Sixteenth Century, summary of, 220 

Slave trade, 45 

Slaves, 72 

Social comforts, 250 

Sokemen, 75 

Somerset the Protector, 209 

South Sea Bubble, 303 

Spain, wars with, 285, 289, 291 

Speculation, 303 

Spinning, 6, 14, 425 

Speenhamland " Act," 409 

Staple, the, 135, 136, 137 

Steamboats, 458 

Stock and land lease, 114, 186 

Stock, 116 

Stone age, 6 

Stourbridge fair, 143 

Supremacy of England, recent, 4 

Survival of ancient population, 35 



Taxation, 99 ; (on wool), 123 ; (in 
the Continental War), 373 

Telegraphs, 458 

Ten hours' day, agitation for, 397, 
404 

Tenants, classes of, 112 

Thegen, 37 

Tories, 321 ; (and factory acts), 405 

Towns (Roman), 23 ; (Saxon), 42 
(Domesday), 69 ; later, 86-97 
origin of, 86 ; privileges of, 89 
town life (mediaeval), 90, 134 
decay of, 145 ; constitution of, 
187 ; decay of, 190 ; new, 191 

Townshend, Lord, 429 

Trade, Free, 456 

Trade, early, 15 ; in Roman times, 
31 ; foreign (Norman), 100 ; 
foreign (fourteenth to sixteenth 
century), 224 ; (sixteenth century), 
240 ; (seventeenth century), 297 ; 
(in 1820), 455 ; (recent), 455, 457, 
461 ; (depression in), 467 

Trades Unions, 419, 449, 471 



U 



Union of Scotland and England, 302 
Unions, Trades, see Trades Unions 



INDEX 



479 



Venetian fleet, 225 

Verulamium, 33 

Village life in eighteenth and early 

nineteenth centuries, 328-331 
Village, Saxon, 37 ; (in Norman 

period), 80 
Village communities, 57 
Villages, industrial, 146 
Villeins, 72, 77, 150, 159 ; (revolt of), 

168, 171 
Vinogradoff, referred to, 52 



W 



Wage-earning class, 111, 150 

Wages, (mediaeval), 173, 175 ; (six- 
teenth century), 253 ; (assess- 
ment of), 253 ; (in seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries), 281 ; 
(in nineteenth century), 424 ; (agri- 
cultural), 447 ; (recent), 470 

War, the Continental, 370, 372 ; 
cost of, 373, 424 

"Wars of nineteenth century, 463 

Watt, James, 345 



Wealth, distribution of (counties), 
67, 107 

Wealth and wars of England, 356 

Weaving, 6, 14 ; (Flemish), 105 ; 
(sixteenth century), 238 ; (inven- 
tions in), 344 

Wedgewood, 315 

Whigs and Tories, 321 

Wiklif, 163 

William III., 289 

Willoughby, 231 

Winchester fair, 142 

Wool and politics, 121 

Wool, 113, 120 (and ch. ix), 124, 
305, 309 

Woollen manufacture and trade, 120; 
(ch. ix), 305, 309 

Working classes, see Labourers 

Worsted trade, 129 



Yeomen, 157, 183 ; decay of, 276 



Zealand, New, 462 



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